Starry Heavens Newsletter
November 2015

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After closing out the month of October with our successful Haunted Village event, attended by over 1,000 ghosts, goblins and parents, many of whom were wowed by the "NIghtwalk" Imaginarium show, we now enter into the holiday season. This month we are bringing back what has proven to be a popular winter show, Season of Light. It’s a family friendly, visually rich show about the darkest and coldest time of year, winter. Despite the chilly weather, winter is home to some of the warmest and brightest celebrations. The show explains why we have seasons and traces the origins of many of the world’s most enduring customs from Christmas trees to the Hanukkah Menorah, Santa to the Star of Bethlehem.

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November Schedule
The show schedule through January 2016 is now online! This month's dates and times are listed below; more information on programs and updates to our schedule are posted on our website, in our Facebook page posts, or you may call the Imaginarium office at (808) 235-7350.

Wednesday, Nov. 11 – 7:00pm
Stargazing (Live program in the Imaginarium with Krissie Kellogg.)
Call (808) 235-7433 for reservations.

SATURDAY MATINEES:
Saturday, Nov. 21 – 1:00pm*
Magic Treehouse Space Mission
Saturday, Nov. 21 – 2:00pm*
Flying Monsters
*NOTE: tickets for each show sold separately

SPECIAL DAY AFTER THANKSGIVING:
Friday, Nov. 27 – 10:00am*
Tales of the Maya Skies
Friday, Nov. 27 – 11:00am*
Season of Light (Holiday show)
*NOTE: tickets for each show sold separately

Reservations
Due to limited seating, we recommend making reservations for our programs.
Call (808) 235-7433 between 8am-4pm, Monday-Friday.
(Reservation phone line is not available on weekends.)
CASH & CHECK ONLY. An ATM is located on campus behind the Imaginarium building, next to The Hub coffee shop.

Please arrive at the Imaginarium at least 30 minutes before showtime. Reserved tickets must be picked up at the Imaginarium box office at least 15 minutes prior to start of program. Unclaimed tickets are released for sale to walk-in customers on a first come, first served basis.

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Leonid Meteor Shower
The Leonids can have an intense peak, however that won’t be the case this year, you can anticipate perhaps a dozen meteors per hour. Best time to look is after midnight on the evening of Nov 17th, the moon will set at 11:26pm so moonlight should not impede viewing. We suggest lying down, looking straight up, and scanning the sky to the East and back to overhead for best viewing.

Pluto Continues To Amaze
Four months after the initial flyby of Pluto by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft the project team continues to announce exciting discoveries about the mysterious planet. Recent evaluations of 3-D maps of the planet’s surface have led geologists to announce that two enormous mountains with large holes in their summits may be cryovolcanoes (ice volcanoes).

While volcanoes here on Earth expel molten rock, the ice volcanoes on Pluto are theorized to emit a somewhat melted slurry of substances such as water ice, nitrogen, ammonia, or methane. If these are volcanoes on Pluto then this discovery could lead to new clues into the geologic and atmospheric evolution of the planet.

Oliver White, New Horizons postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California noted that, “These are big mountains with a large hole in their summit, and on Earth that generally means one thing -- a volcano. If they are volcanic, then the summit depression would likely have formed via collapse as material is erupted from underneath. The strange hummocky texture of the mountain flanks may represent volcanic flows of some sort that have traveled down from the summit region and onto the plains beyond, but why they are hummocky, and what they are made of, we don't yet know.”

The possibility of the cryovolcanoes was one of 50 discoveries announced about Pluto this week at the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in National Harbor, Maryland.


Photo: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

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As always, we welcome your feedback or questions, feel free to phone (808) 235-7350 or email to wiss@hawaii.edu. if you would like information regarding our Adopt-a-Show sponsorship program please click here.

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