Space Sciences

Article

Astro History: The Great Debate

On April 26th, 1920, two of the biggest heavy hitters in astronomical science of the day, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, met in Washington, DC for what is today known simply as The Great Debate. ​In honor of the anniversary of this event, let’s meet...
Theater Show
Tuesday, April 21 | Panel at 6:00 pm, film screening at 6:45 pm

Massachusetts Space Week: Astronaut Panel and Apollo 13 Screening

Failure was not an option—celebrate Massachusetts Space Week with a special panel followed by Apollo 13 on the IMAX® Dome screen.
Event
Tuesday, April 21 | Panel at 6:00 pm, film screening at 6:45 pm

Massachusetts Space Week: Astronaut Panel and Apollo 13 Screening

Failure was not an option—celebrate Massachusetts Space Week with a special panel followed by Apollo 13 on the IMAX® Dome screen.
Article

Planetary Profile: Strange Saturn

Yay, it’s time for the next entry in my weird solar system series and next up we have a big one: the ringed planet Saturn! Saturn has a wide array of features that are bizarre, so I’m going to have to pick and choose which ones to focus on.
Article

Reflections: Looking Back on Artemis II

The Artemis II mission is officially done, and I kind of can’t believe it. What would a major historical milestone be without nerds like me picking it apart to point out their favorite moments? Join me as I relieve my top moments from the incredible...
Article

Go for Ignition: Imagining NASA’s Ambitious Future

Boy it must feel good to be NASA right now. There’s “Ignition”, that major list of new initiatives that are, theoretically, going to completely change the game in terms of what NASA is working on and what space exploration in general is going to be. In...
Article

100th Post!

Hey, would you look at that! This is the 100th post on the Spacing Out blog! So in celebration of me spitting a lot of words about space out into the wilds of the internet, I’m taking a look back at the last 99 posts and looking at all the crazy stuff...
Article

Cosmic Vocab: Black Hole Edition

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of my space vocab posts, so let’s look at some of the most mysterious things we see out in space: black holes. Their mass (whatever that is) is so densely packed that for some region around it its gravity is so...
Theater Show
March 20 – May 9 | Friday and Saturday evenings

Project Hail Mary

One astronaut. One impossible mission. One IMAX® Dome journey across the universe.
Event
Thursday, March 19, 2026 | 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Beyond the Telescope: Observing the Universe's Cosmic Dawn with JWST

Journey to the outermost reaches of our observable universe in this immersive Planetarium program featuring MIT astrophysicist Christina Eilers, PhD. Using real data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), travel back in time to seek the surroundings...
Article

Space News Deep Dive: Solar Migration

The Sun is not the same star it was when it first started shoving hydrogen atoms together 4.6 billion years ago. And, as it turns out, it’s not hanging out in the same neighborhood it first grew up in either. So let’s do a deep dive and see where it is we...
Article

Making Marks

This week’s post is brought to you entirely by the fact that I saw a picture that was sent to Earth from the Perseverance rover on Mars. The rover took a picture of some tracks it had left behind it. There’s something beautifully simple and yet profound...
Article

Space News Deep Dive: The Artemis Shake-Up

In the same week that we learned that the SLS rocket due to carry the Artemis 2 crew into space had to be rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs. So let’s talk about what the changes are, what they mean for the program, and myself and so...
Article

Space News Deep Dive: How Saturn Got Its Rings (And Many Other Things)

I love the Saturn system. I love weird gravity shenanigans. A new study set out to find how Saturn’s rings could have formed. It goes back to a single precipitating event that set a whole string of cosmic dominos falling. So join me in this Saturnian...
Article

Space News Deep Dive: Rewriting Star Death

Researchers at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics had been able to watch a star in our neighboring galaxy Andromeda directly collapse into a black hole without going supernova for the first time. This is big. So I’m going to do a deep dive into this...