Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium facts for kids
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Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium
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Front entrance of the main building
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 Location in Vermont
Location in the United States
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| Location | 1302 Main St., St. Johnsbury, Vermont |
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| Area | 1 acre |
| Built | 1890 |
| Architect | Packard, Lambert |
| Architectural style | Romanesque |
| Website | www.fairbanksmuseum.org |
| NRHP reference No. | 07001344 |
| Added to NRHP | January 1, 2008 |
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| Museum Director | Adam Kane (2015–) |
| Planetarium Director, Chief Meteorologist | Mark Breen |
The Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium is a combination natural science museum, history museum, and planetarium located in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. It was founded in 1890 by businessman, politician, naturalist, and collector Franklin Fairbanks. The museum and its buildings are on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
The Eye on the Sky Weather Station is a meteorology and weather forecasting station operated regularly at the site since 1893. Meteorologists broadcast their unique weather forecasts for Vermont, New Hampshire, and areas immediately around the region, on Vermont Public Radio and Magic 97.7. The museum also produces daily weather forecasts for three newspapers: The Caledonian Record, Times Argus, and Rutland Herald.
The Lyman Spitzer Jr. Planetarium, established in 1960, is located at the museum, and produces public astronomy shows, as well as educational classes on various space science topics. Astronomers and educational presenters from the planetarium, along with members of the Vermont Astronomical Society, regularly contribute to and appear on science segments for local news stations, notably WCAX, and produce the Eye on the Night Sky astronomy program for radio broadcast.
Contents
History
The town of St. Johnsbury had a long history with the Fairbanks family, having been the location of the Fairbanks Scales headquarters and factories since the 1820s, as well as several other mansions and estates owned by members of the family. Before founding the museum, Franklin Fairbanks had served as President of the company, which his father and uncle had founded.
The location for the museum had been inspected, approved, cleared, and prepared in 1889. Construction on the main building began on July 4, 1890 when the cornerstone was laid and was finished by June 1891. Designed by Lambert Packard, the building features red sandstone and limestone laid in Richardsonian-Romanesque style. The museum was opened in autumn 1891 and was expanded in 1894 to hold Franklin Fairbanks' full collection. Much of the main collection in the museum comes from Fairbanks' own pre-existing collection, for which the museum was purposefully built to contain and display.
In part, the museum's tradition of reporting the weather and atmospheric conditions comes from Fairbanks' own practice of doing so.
In 1960, in the front overhang of the building, the planetarium and space gallery were installed, replacing an older exhibit area. It opened to the public in 1961, becoming the only public planetarium in Vermont, and has been periodically upgraded over time, while being continuously operated ever since.
In 2017, a "butterfly greenhouse" was installed in the area behind the main building, next to the meteorology instrumentation area. An open structure with a canopy cover and benches along the inside, the greenhouse exhibited local flora in flowerbeds and various species of live butterflies, between the months of April and November, as both an educational and leisure area for visitors. In September 2020 the structure was replaced with a more permanent year-round outdoor classroom area, which will continue to house the plants and insects between spring-autumn.
The Fairbanks Museum has seen continuous operation since its founding, other than annual brief closures every January for upkeep and maintenance of the exhibits and facilities, and rotation of the vast collection in and out of storage. However, due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the museum closed in March 2020, and only partially reopened between July-December 2020. While closed, the weather station and some educational programs continued to operate, holding regular online classes and science livestreams, as well as pandemic situation updates for local residents in Vermont and New Hampshire. Between 2020-2022, major modification and construction is taking place to expand the eastern side of main building to provide more exhibition area and greater accessibility, with major funding being provided by the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration. General building maintenance and preservation work will also be carried out during this time.
Contemporary museum collection
The museum is organized into 4 different departments: Natural, Historical, Ethnological, and Astronomical. The entire collection includes roughly 175,000 objects, and storage and archive spaces are maintained for many of the items when not on display.
The Museum's exhibits include natural specimens, a seasonal wildflower table, a native butterfly house and flower garden (spring-summer), an observation beehive (spring-summer), artistic pieces made out of insects, taxidermy dioramas (moose, bison, flamingos, bears, birds of paradise, snakes, woodchucks and opossums), endangered and extinct species, dinosaurs and fossils, as well as geological displays, ethnographic displays, and various historical and cultural artifacts from around the world. On the second floor there is an exhibit about atmospheric ice crystal formation, featuring photographs by Snowflake Bentley, a friend of Franklin Fairbanks. Also displayed are 19th and 20th century manufacturing hardware and scales from the E & T Fairbanks Scales Company, founded by Franklin's father and uncle, Erastus and Thaddeus Fairbanks. Educational classes are regularly provided for local schools and tour groups. An audio tour of the exhibits is available to visitors as well.
Planetarium
The Lyman Spitzer Jr. Planetarium and Vinton Space Science Gallery (sometimes shortened to simply the "Spitzer Planetarium"), located at the top of a spiral staircase on the second floor overhanging the front entrance, was built between 1958-1960 following the International Geophysical Year, and first publicly opened in April 1961, under museum director Fred Mold. It is named after famed scientist Lyman Spitzer Jr., a pioneer of modern astrophysics and astronomical observation. In the planetarium lobby is the space science gallery, displayed in which are astrophotographs from the Northern Skies Observatory in nearby Peacham, Vermont, images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as an iron-nickel meteorite recovered in Patagonia. Also in the gallery is a Fairbanks Scale which displays the equivalent weight of an object or person if it were in the gravitational field of the Moon or other planets in the Solar System.
Live shows and presentations as well as planetarium movies cover a variety of topics, including basic backyard stargazing, the history and development of astronomy, constellations and their association with various mythology and cultures, celestial navigation, artificial satellites and spacecraft missions, Lunar exploration, planetary science, heliophysics, exoplanetary science, astrodynamics, and cosmology. It is one of only two public planetaria in northern New England, along with the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center.
History and upgrades
The section of the museum now occupied by the planetarium previously contained a historical exhibit about Vermont during the colonial period. During the earlier years of its operation, the planetarium originally used simple folding chairs situated around a projection module, but in the 1980s the chairs were replaced by rows of curved benches arranged in semicircles on either side.
In 2012, the planetarium was upgraded with the installation of digital hardware and software, greatly increasing capabilities, and allowing for the projection of specialized 360° video. However, the analog hardware originally used in the 1960s, including a control panel and a dodecahedron with optical pinholes used for star projection, are on permanent display on the main floor of the museum.
The planetarium was further renovated between 2018–2019, including the replacement of the benches with modern seating in a more traditional theater arrangement, and rotating the hemispherical projection screen forward, both expanding audience capacity and improving comfortability of the domed theater. An elevator was also installed to improve accessibility, connecting the main museum entrance with the planetarium lobby.
Events and outreach
Notable recent space themed events hosted by the museum include observations of the 2012 Transit of Venus, the 2017 North American Solar Eclipse, and a 2018 world record astronomy observation. For the 2020 Winter Solstice Jupiter-Saturn Conjunction, due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the planetarium hosted a live online event with telescope views and descriptions of the two planets and their moons. For the upcoming 2024 North American Solar Eclipse, the museum is expecting a greater event than that of 2017, as the path of totality will be passing over the area of Vermont, providing a more spectacular viewing opportunity.
From July 16–24, 2019, the museum displayed exhibits celebrating the semicentennial of Apollo 11; on July 20, it hosted an event which featured a real-time rebroadcast of the mission, showings of contemporary documentaries from 1969, model rocket construction and launching, spaceflight simulations, planetarium shows focused on the Moon and both past and future human lunar exploration, as well as lunar regolith and rock samples from various Apollo missions obtained by the museum for temporary display by NASA as part of a public science outreach initiative by the agency in observation of the event.
The museum and planetarium hosts a summer astronomy camp for local students ever year, in which they participate in astronomy lessons about planets, stars, and constellations, as well as the construction and launching of model rockets.
The planetarium regularly coordinates with the Northern Skies Observatory, an astronomy research, observation, and image and data processing center located in Peacham, Vermont, and the Vermont Astronomical Society, to host public outdoor astronomy events at the observatory site and across the state. In more recent years, Spitzer Planetarium presenters also utilize a smaller, inflatable dome, called a "portable planetarium", featuring the same projection software as the main planetarium, for presentations at schools and other indoor event spaces in the region.
Praise and recognition
The museum was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008. The listing included one contributing building and two contributing objects.
In 2010, Yankee magazine named Fairbanks as the second best history museum in New England.
On August 10, 2018, the museum obtained the world record for the largest astronomy observation event, with over 1500 people attending a live night sky astronomy lesson, as well as telescope demonstrations and other educational displays. The event was certified by Guinness World Records and covered by Vermont Public Radio and local news media.
In 2019, the museum's weather station surpassed its 125th anniversary, and was recognized by the World Meteorological Organization, National Weather Service, and NOAA as the second oldest regular meteorological observation station in North America, after the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, having begun a continuous streak of weather observations in early 1894.
Images for kids
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Sign on front lawn beside the entrance of the museum
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A U.S. Navy Polaris missile rocket displayed in front of the museum in the early 1960s, dubbed the "Fairbanks Museum Security System".
