Equinox celebrated with events at museum

Equinox celebrated with events at museum

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

The Rice Space Institute (RSI) is marking Sunday’s equinox with events at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS), including a viewing of the sun’s surface, a webcast from the ruins of Chichen Itza in Mexico and screenings of the latest Rice/HMNS-produced program at the Burke Baker Planetarium.

Sunday is Sun-Earth Day, a worldwide celebration of the spring equinox. The equinox, which means “equal night,” occurs twice each year when the sun is directly over the equator.

At solar noon, about 12:20 p.m., a lens atop the sundial near the museum’s main entrance will cast the sun’s image onto a piece of paper, allowing viewers to witness sunspots and other surface details that can’t typically be seen with the naked eye.

From 4 to 5 p.m., a live webcast in the museum’s grand hall will show live video from the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, where a 75-foot pyramid honors Kulkulkan, the feathered serpent god revered by the Mayans. During the spring equinox, the setting sun creates the illusion of a serpent writhing down the north face of the pyramid. The optical effect is created by the shadow of seven triangles cast upon the western balustrade of the pyramid’s main staircase, which has a stone carving of a large serpent’s head at its base. The shadows give the illusion of an enormous snake dropping from the sky, which is believed to be symbolic of the return of fertility to the earth.

The sundial and Chichen Itza viewings are free. Visitors can take advantage of the break between the events to see the new Burke Baker program “Earth’s Wild Ride,” which airs every hour. It is the eighth in a series of innovative planetarium programs developed by HMNS in collaboration with RSI with partial funding from NASA. This 22-minute program is set during a solar eclipse in the year 2081. In the planetarium show, set in a lunar colony, a grandfather and his grandchildren watch the moon’s shadow creep across the earth.

For more information, visit <http://sunearthday.nasa.gov> or <http://space.rice.edu>.