Self-Updating
Permanent
Exhibits

• Introduction
• Viewspace
• SkyWatch
  • Features
  • Programming
  • Testimonials
• General Information
  • Locations
  • Technical Support
  • FAQs
  • Specifications

Does your park or nature center reside in a dark-sky site? Would your visitors enjoy attaining a better understanding of the night sky? "WOW! This really captivated me. Great use of images, made message relevant, good visuals, demonstrated the use of science, encouraged users to look to the night sky... good music, relaxing, intriguing, capivating, and relevant." - Judge's comments, 2005 NAI Interpretive Media Awards. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is among many NASA science missions that are delivering breathtaking views of the cosmos, including our own blue planet, forever altering our understanding of space and our place in it. Now visitors to your park and nature center can join this great journey of celestial exploration as never before.

SkyWatch is an internet-fed, self-updating, permanent exhibit program from the Space Telescope Science Institute, home of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. Produced in collaboration with NASA’s Earth Observing System, SkyWatch transforms a small corner of your interpretive exhibit area into an ever changing kaleidoscope of inspiring and educational presentations about the night sky and the latest and most beautiful in astronomy and earth science.

SkyWatch uses an internet-connected multimedia PC and a large-format display (such as data-grade video projector, plasma display panel, or presentation monitor) to show free-running multimedia presentations that combine:

• Beautiful, high resolution images
• Digital movies and animations
• Interpretive captions, and
• Evocative music

SkyWatch portrays the beauty and power of the universe and the blue planet as seen from above, and gently guides the viewer to a deeper understanding of astronomy through lucid, well-paced exposition. It’s the perfect way to inspire your visitors to study the night sky, and to participate in your night sky interpretive events and programs.

The production and delivery of SkyWatch is a free service (a modest first-year startup fee and very small annual fee for subsequent years covers our costs for the commercial display software we provide to your site). To show SkyWatch, you furnish the necessary playback hardware — an internet-connected Windows PC to our specs, loudspeakers, a display, and some comfortable seats in a darkened “mini-theater” space. Once you’re set up, we’ll provide continual and varied programming updates via Internet upload.

Your patrons will enjoy SkyWatch. Some will take in the view for a few minutes. Some will read the captions and learn astronomy. Some will sit engrossed for an hour or more. This happens quite often!

You will have an astronomy exhibit that never goes out of date, one that brings the advantages of Hubble’s enormous popularity to your institution.