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National Air and Space Museum specials



“Public Observatory”


“Alan Bean: Painting Apollo, First Artist on Another World” (Until February 2010)


First stage of “Moving Beyond Earth” Gallery (permanent)



For a museum which would take a week to see everything, National Air and Space Museum has three shows worth seeing.


Alan Bean


One gallery of the NASM is dedicated to art and culture of space exploration and features works by astronaut Alan Bean.


Alan Bean was not the first astronaut to step on the moon but it has been noted that he was the first man to eat spaghetti there! Besides that dubious distinction among the select group of 11 men who have walked on the moon, he is one of a few who are also artists.


Bean’s training was in watercolor and Monet is his favorite painter. When someone suggested that he paint what he had seen on the moon, he questioned how this was possible since the light and color on the moon were rather stark by comparison with impressionistic works. The answer is that an artist you have to figure out how to do things.


Many artists have rendered the moon from 238,000 miles away in poetic terms, and some have transformed the exploration photographs into painted historical scenes. The freshness of Bean’s work distinguishes itself by being recorded from memory by someone trained in scientific observation.

The results are a series of paintings which capture the events of space exploration in a way that photography can not, as remembered and recreated by a man who saw it up close and first hand.


Fun is where you find it and one section is devoted to the fun and the fantasy of the Apollo missions. What Peter Conrad said when he stepped on the moon was “Whoopee!” --and a scenes of astronauts playing golf and tossing aluminum foil exude their joy of really being in a place that is beyond imagination.


The exhibit includes Bean’s space suit, a moon buggy and tools that were used in the mission. Bean not only left his foot print on the moon but took back some of the dust on his space suit--dust which he incorporates in his paints. He also used some of these objects to give texture to the grayness of the moon surface.


Bean is possibly going to be the first man whose work might one day be in an art gallery on the moon. Considering man’s perpetual efforts to explore and colonize new territories, it is not impossible to imagine that a thousand years from now these lunar landscapes will be viewed--on the moon--in the same way as we regard cave paintings of prehistory. For now, one can see 50 of his original works in the NASM’s Gallery


Pulblic Observator


For the International Year of Astronomy, 400 years after Galileo’s discoveries, NASM has opened a new public observatory which contains a 16-inch, 3,000-pound Boller and Chivens telescope, previously used for research at Harvard’s Oak Ridge Observatory. Visitors will be able to view the sun (with a special filter), the moon and the brighter stars and planets, such as Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, during daylight hours.


Stage one of new gallery


“Moving Beyond Earth” gallery gives visitors a chance to experience space through computer kiosks, advanced interactive displays and state-of-the-art projection and audio technology. In short, it’s like being inside a computer to play games to experience space.


Also on display are two instruments that were brought back from the Hubble Space Telescope on the latest servicing mission: the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 will be on display in Space hall and Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement in the new “Moving Beyond Earth” gallery.


The sky --sun, moon, planets and stars--belong to everyone. What better place to explore our human legacy than at the NASM.


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