Support the Isaac Asimov Fund

Isaac Asimov was an active and supportive member of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City during his lifetime. Janet and Robyn Asimov have worked with the Museum to raise an endowed fund in Isaac's memory, to provide ongoing support for an Annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Panel Debate at the Hayden Planetarium.

The debate will be held each year on a topic related to astronomy, astrophysics, and our place in the universe. In this way Isaac's name will continue to be associated with the Museum and its role at the forefront of public science education. The first Isaac Asimov Memorial Panel Debate will take place at the Hayden Planetarium on February 13, 2000. Your support for the fund will enable the Museum to continue this association in the years to come.

To contribute to the fund, make your check payable to the American Museum of Natural History, and note that the gift is for the Isaac Asimov Memorial Fund. Send your donation, together with your name and address, to:

Office of Planned Giving
American Museum of Natural History
Central Park West at 79th Street
New York, NY 10024-5192
Telephone: 212-769-5119 or 800-453-5734

About the new Hayden Planetarium

The new Hayden Planetarium opened in February 2000, as part of the Frederic Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space, which will also include the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Hall of the Universe and the Hall of Planet Earth.

The 440 seat Hayden Planetarium Sky Theater houses the Hayden Edition Zeiss Universarium MKIX, an all-dome digital video projection system, and a fifty speaker audio system, designed to provide a vivid three-dimensional experience of the sky. Because of the circular design of the theater and the hemispherical shape of the screen, each seat will effectively be "the best seat in the house".

The Zeiss MKIX, together with NASA's Digital Galaxy Project, allows visitors to the Sky Theater to travel anywhere in the solar system, seeing the planets not only in different spatial perspectives, but also from past and future points in time.

Outside the planetarium, the Scales of the Universe exhibit spans a 400-foot-long square walkway, leading visitors through a path from the edge of the universe to the heart of the atom, progressing through 42 orders of magnitude of the size scale of the universe.

Below the planetarium is the Big Bang Theater, where visitors can witness the birth of the universe, while narration, instruments, and gauges describe and monitor the development of the newborn universe. By assigning each particle a pitch, note, period, and frequency, a musical score is produced that allows visitors to hear the musical sound of the universe being born.

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