Oct 1: Lange Nacht Der Museen

Tonight I had the chance to go to the “Lange Nacht Der Museen” – the “Long Night of Museums.” For 11 Euros, you had the chance to go visit as many museums in Austria that you could…but only between 6pm and 1am. The race was on! I went with A, one of the other exchange students I met in our orientation sessions. She is from Taiwan and has a similar passion for things under glass, so we both had a ball biking from museum to museum. J

We visited 5 between 6:00 and 11:30. We started at the botanical gardens, where we got a tour of the three different greenhouses that keep plants from all over the world. The greenhouses had catwalks so that you could see the tops of some of the tallest trees growing there. The carnivorous plants were also interesting to see – take a look at the pictures!

We tried to take a look at the criminal museum (forensic science), but the line was a bit too long. So we stopped by the physics department at the university where they were showing historical physics instruments. Very cool, even though my German physics vocabulary was so limited that I had to guess at the purpose of a lot of the instruments. Our next stop was the armoury, because A hadn’t seen it yet. We got a tour in German, but I was able to understand some of it! I also learned some new information that I hadn’t known about when I went the first time, so that was really exciting.

We then stopped by a photography exhibit and peeked in at the modern art museum. It’s pretty big, though, so I think I’ll have to come back to that another time. But our last stop was at the Kepler museum. It was held in a junior high school, and they had a room entirely devoted to Kepler’s ideas (the “Keplerraum”). It was really amazing!!! (This year, I wrote a paper on Kepler’s work in musical harmonies and planetary motion, and to see an exhibit of Kepler’s work in the city that he worked in was incredibly exciting. :-D)

I think the best part of the night, however, was visiting the observatory at the Kepler museum. We waited…waited….waited in line, but when we got to the top, we had the chance to see Jupiter!!! We could also see its four moons Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, sparkling like little jewels around it. The resolution was so good that we could even see the cloud bands. It was a wonderful night.



Plants requiring lots of moisture (many carnivorous plants in this area)



Venus flytrap.



Purple pitcher plant.



Toepler's Influence Machine



Model of the earth and the fixed stars (on a "celestial sphere"), likely 1500s-1600s.



M and A at the Kepler Museum.



The posters were Austria-wide!



In the Keplerraum.




A depiction of Kepler's "Platonic Solids".

 

The title page of one of Kepler's works.