Exploratorium Goes Global

About 9 a.m. Thursday, a group of 150 people will file into a San Francisco museum to watch a solar eclipse that would otherwise be visible only from the other side of the planet.

The cosmic event is being broadcast over the Internet from a field station in Aruba to mark the unveiling of a new state-of-the-art Internet production and viewing studio at the Exploratorium in San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts.

The studio is part of a $5-million, high-tech make-over for the Exploratorium, an airplane hangar-sized museum founded by physicist Frank Oppenheimer in 1969 to teach young people the joys of science.

Using donated equipment from Silicon Valley giants such as 3Com Corp., the new, 150-seat Internet studio is designed to give museum visitors a glimpse of scientific projects around the globe. But it is also meant to give children from around the world a look into the Exploratorium.

Thursday’s event, for instance, can also be experienced through the museum’s Web site at https://www.exploratorium.edu. NASA scientists at the field station in Aruba will answer questions about the eclipse.