More Museum Lists, Design Ideas

SO I've been looking up more museums, mostly keeping to within the three hour radius established by Atlanta, Charlotte, Oak Ridge, and Bristol VA (to cover the four states within "range", although Bristol is more of a formality--Virginia is basically just too far). I've found a few, of varying location and subject matter, some of which look more useful than others.

This is a major attraction. Can we do that? We have way more awesome space rocks.

Previously mentioned: Discovery Place, The Schiele Museum, the Colburn Earth Science Center, the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the Fernbank Museum. New on this list:

• The Catawba Science Center, Hickory NC. Listed because, according to its website, it actually has some space science exhibits and interactives! I know. Wow. 
• Mineral and Lapidary Museum, Hendersonville NC. Listed because they managed to make their meteorite (singular) a major attraction and I want to know how the heck they did it. (Photo from their website posted earlier.) They also have an exhibit on fluorescent minerals and some stuff on fossils and geodes. If they're any good, they would be an awesome resource. (I've linked to their website.)
• Museum of North Carolina Minerals, Spruce Pine NC. It's a smallish museum, but I remember enjoying it as a kid. I think they had some interactives. They're relatively nearby, worth considering. 
• Tennessee Museum of Aviation, Pigeon Forge TN. Actually slightly north of Pigeon Forge--we're not talking the usual Gatlinburg area levels of kitsch...Probably. It's a little hard to tell from their website. I'm fairly tentatively putting this one in, but they seem to have some kind of neat stuff? it might be redundant, though, given the closer-to-home
• Carolinas Aviation Museum, Charlotte NC. Which is mediocre at best, but they're new. They might have somebody on their staff who has recently done or is doing the same general stuff I am, and might therefore be able to offer advice. They're also on an old Military/aviation site and it might be interesting to see if they have any ideas or suggestions for working the history of the site into the museum itself. 

 Further away, there's also the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill, NC. I don't know how much they have, how good a museum it is, what's in their collection, etc. If anyone familiar with the place knows anything else about it, I'd appreciate it if you commented, messaged me, somehow let me know. It's outside my 3-hour radius, as is the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, but they're within a fairly easy drive of each other and I could, if I had to, hunt down their curators on a weekend or use Charlotte as a halfway point for a night.

There's also a Salt and Pepper Shaker museum in Gatlinburg. I have no intention of going there, I just thought you ought to know that people will make a museum about literally anything. There's a defunct museum on teapots in North Carolina, for crying out loud.

Furthermore, as an update on one of the museums I mentioned yesterday--The Colburn Museum in Asheville--yes, we do have connections there. Apparently my mentor is on the board, or something. And they're trying to do a larger scale version of what I'm trying to do here, as well as changing their name to the Asheville Museum Of Science (AMOS). 

Continuing my hunt for Something Productive To Do, I found a well-put together journal by UK science museums. It had an interesting point to make: 

Without context, a museum like ours (which displays objects with difficult-to-understand information and little sense of the "big picture") is essentially an art museum. Visitors are forced to acknowledge our displays for their inherent beauty only. 

Which would be fine...except that most of our artefacts range from "not beautiful" to "just plain funny looking". Mildly problematic. There's nothing inherently beautiful about a chunk of S-band relay. It looks like a piece of a video game console, if your video game console was built in the late 1980s and met an exceptionally violent end at the hands of your little cousin. Who gave your cousin a screwdriver? What's wrong with you? Why did you tell him to mess with the Nintendo? You psycho, NOW how can we play Pac-Man? I wanted Blinky to die, sure, but not like this!!! 

(If you don't know what an S-band antenna is: One "broke" at Space Camp during a mission and we were rapidly losing communications with the "space shuttle". Eventually we had to switch to a different radio antenna--we don't have a chunk of that one, Ku-band--and sell a "deceased" member of mission control to China, who were blocking our S-band radio, to get them to stop. The Ku-band was located inside the space shuttle's payload bay, S-band wasn't. I think we miiiiight be the only team in the history of space camp to try that particular tactic--the corpse-selling one. We didn't tell them he was dead, in fairness...) 

In other words, yes, an artefact can have intrinsic value. Currently, some of ours do--like our prettier crystals and rocks and the copper. Shiny things are popular. But a piece of Random Space Junk is harder to empathise with, understand, or appreciate.

Context and the display of an object are important--we can't just mount stuff on a plinth and expect it to draw in crowds. The 3D printers are popular with kids (I think several sat there literally until closing yesterday watching whatever it was that was being printed), because they move and we have a range of 3D printed knick knacks on display next to them. Possibly for another interesting reason as well, though--we have put them in their "real" context. A science-y room where people are sitting at (sometimes alarmingly large) computers doing what the guest can just tell is something scientific and difficult to understand. 3D printers are still futuristic and semi-alien, just like the giant telescopes or mysterious coding or whatever that funky microscope thing is. 

Of course, there's also the argument that museums don't actually even need objects these days. Did anyone see that Van Gogh exhibit in Discovery Place? An entire museum exhibit consisting of screens, VR, projections, and some thematically appropriate music and films. I can't be the only one who finds these types of exhibitions somewhat hollow. It's why I have no particular desire to visit Discovery Place: If I can't see something real that I couldn't access on my own, what's the point? I don't find these types of exhibits as satisfying as a museum without something real to back them up, which is why I'm still trying to figure out the best system to use our real collections of objects. Maybe I'm just being a square about this, but there you go.

I'm also continuing to sketch interactive exhibits, because the above mentioned chunk of antenna isn't likely to look like much even in context. Giving it meaning and getting anyone invested in it, ever, is a bit...challenging. 

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The text in silver--which I'm aware didn't photograph well--reads "Can this possibly be wall mounted?" and "When panel is flipped up, displays 2 layers of info: Whether option was right/wrong with picture, further information about object (if right) or explanation why wrong in smaller print." This also says 1-2 of the items because I'm not sure we'd have the space for more, especially if these are on the wall or off to the side a bit, to get visitors who pause at them out of the walking path of the gallery.

 I like the flip-panel idea because it's simple, easy to use, hard to break, easy to update (if needed) and requires basically zero technical work. I think you basically need some cut-to-size LDF particle board, a handle, a hinge, and some professional looking labels to coat each size. The labels are the hard part; I'll be devoting some time in July to researching graphic design companies capable of printing such a thing. Snappy graphics and bold, eye-catching colors, possibly following a blue/gold color scheme (PARI's color is blue, and that gold carpet isn't going anywhere), are also a must for this sort of thing. 

Oh, and because I'm just sort of running on a hamster wheel over here, it might be interesting to say what the guy next to me is doing with his internship. PARI has an archive of thousands of glass plates from the early days of telescope photography, before it all went digital. We have astronomical data from as far back as 1880, some digitised, a fair amount not. The problem is that we have thousands of glass plates that are somewhat difficult to sort through at this stage. So his internship involves writing software to--if I understand this right--teach our computer database to recognise stars. 

This is apparently much easier said than done. He's written a program that can get a computer to isolate the white dots in this test image that are most likely to be stars

Enbiggened significantly

and which are too faint, and likely just noise. The computer can do it, and spits out an impressive looking matrix, but I can't show you what the computer then "sees" once it kills off all the extraneous data because it isn't spitting out an image that can then be viewed--just the impressive looking matrix, which I suppose could be printed and colored in with crayons color-by-number fashion, but the printer has decided that it hates all interns and won't actually print for us. (There is a separate region of hell just for printers, after all. I suspect it's somewhere in the seventh circle, or the Wrathful and Sullen, if you take the Inferno as a comprehensive guidebook.)

Still, he seems to be making significant progress, although as somebody illiterate in all programming languages (I played around in BASIC once!), I can't explain that in detail.