MOS and NAT

I got to visit two fabulous science museums, one on each coast, during my February-March cross-country trip. I showed you a neat exhibit from the Nat in San Diego last time, and I will tell you more about that Museum in a minute. But first, the even more spectacular Boston Museum of Science, which is right on the "banks of the River Charles," as you can see...
 

Its exhibits are fun and fascinating, especially their dinosaurs, which were a big hit with my youngest companion. But I was really agog during the whole visit by the building itself. It's so big, it's difficult to convey the super-coolness of its design in still photos...

...but I can give you some idea of the beauty and creativity of the place by focusing on a couple of elements that you can see in the shot above.

First, on the right you see what looks like a greenish deep-plus velvet stripe down the wall. It's actually a gigantic vertical planter box!

Part of an exhibit on water (and specifically, Boston's river), it's nourished by a sheet of water and is both beautiful and astonishing...I've never seen anything like it!

Another design element that caught my eye is the ceiling above the walkway that you can see in the middle of the photo above. I mean, why just have a ceiling of acoustical tile, when you can have a gorgeous, changeable, hi-def video featuring scientific topics?!

fishes (with human companions for scale)

star nursery

prehistoric aquatic creatures?

Aren't those videos stupendous?! (BTW, our newly renovated and expanded Witte Museum in San Antonio—whose wonderful reciprocal membership benefits have saved us lots of money at both the museums in this post as well as elsewhere!—also has one just inside and above the new front door. I'll try and put a picture of it in a future Wordless Wednesday post soon and show you more of this great new exhibit space when I can.)

And there was at least one other great visual feature that you could actually manipulate on your own. I took a turn at making these lovely squiggly lines do all kinds of mathematically sophisticated acrobatics. (I didn't care that almost all of the other museum visitors that did this were half my size and 1/10 my age! But I should have taken a video.)

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Across the country we visited another great science museum in San Diego, their Natural History Museum.

It is also situated on scenic property; here's a look out one of their second-floor windows at the very photogenic Casa del Prado, just across the street...

Like several other buildings in Balboa Park (although not the current NAT), it was built for the Panama-California Exposition in 1915. which celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal. I'll show you more pictures of these iconic San Diego buildings in a future post.

There were all kinds of cool exhibits in the Museum, including the "Citizen-Scientist" room that I referred to above. I really enjoyed their large collection of animal sculls, from the tiniest (that the Adorable Granddaughter would have found enchanting) to some behemoths. But unfortunately my photos of those exhibits didn't turn out well. (You can see some of the big sculls here, but inexplicably they don't have pictures of the teeny ones!)

I did a little better with this rather menacing shark replica...

...as well as this amazing clockwork....thingy (I couldn't find anything on the website that tells what it is, and I neglected to take a photo of the informational card that was with it). But isn't it gorgeous?!

Here's a closer look at the "egg," as well as a very large piece of jade that was on display. I foolishly didn't have Henry stand next to it for scale, but it was probably 3 or 4 feet high!