AMNH Announces Laser Art Installation & Thanksgiving Day Balloons

As Buzz Lightyear, Spider-Man, Kermit, and their colorful balloon buddies get pumped up for their starring roles in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, spectators who come to watch the annual balloon inflation on 77th and 81st Streets will also be able to enjoy a laser art installation at the American Museum of Natural History, best seen from 81st Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue.

Bright green waves of laser light ripple across the Hayden Sphere in the Museum's Rose Center for Earth and Space, illustrating how the Hubble Space Telescope analyzes distant galaxies, quasars, and other celestial objects in the universe. The public art installation, From the Distant Past: Decoding the Light of Hubble, will pulse from 5 pm to 11 pm each evening through Sunday, November 27, showcasing a unique convergence of science and art.

Created by German artist Tim Otto Roth in collaboration with astronomer Bob Fosbury, the former head of the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility, the installation resembles the squiggly line of an electrocardiogram. This luminous pattern is based on data captured by Hubble's spectrometers, advanced instruments that act like prisms, separating light from the cosmos into its constituent colors. This provides a spectrum "fingerprint" of the object being observed, which tells scientists about its temperature, chemical composition, and motion, all key indicators in understanding the development and age of the universe.

The laser installation is presented to ring in the exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, which opened on Saturday, November 19. For more information, visit amnh.org

From the Distant Past: Decoding the Light of Hubble is funded by the Space Telescope Science Institute and the European Space Agency.

WHERE American Museum of Natural History
81st Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue