MOAS Blog

A special event will delight night sky observers this summer: the opposition of Mars. Opposition is sort of a fancy way of saying that Mars will be on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun, so we will have an alignment of the three objects in space. Oppositions with Mars happen very regularly and frequently, about once every 2 years (or 780 Earth days to be exact)...

History of the Fourth of July

The 4th of July is one of our country’s patriotic celebrations. Work on the document that led to it officially becoming a federal holiday began on June 11, 1776. The Colonies' Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and formed a committee whose express purpose was drafting a document that would formally sever the thirteen colonies' ties with Great Britain...

Robo-Car Race Track

The GE Volunteers have completed the installation of one of the larger hands-on exhibits in the Charles and Linda Williams Children's Museum at MOAS – the new Robo-Car Race Track. This was accomplished with the expert assistance of Alphagraphics, a local printing and graphics business. The new exhibit features self-steering robot cars that visitors...

Role Reversal: How Paintings and Photography Switched Roles in the 20th Century

It is hard to over-estimate the influence of photography on the development of art since the 19th-century. Although camera obscura image projection had been known since ancient times, 1839 marks the year photography was introduced to the public through the daguerreotype, the first photographic process to require only minutes to achieve an image. Soon photographers were turning their cameras towards all types of subject...

Latest Blog Posts

Discovering the Glyptodont

It is hard to imagine that the glyptodont, the giant creature with a likeness to an armadillo on display in the Museum's Prehistory of Florida Gallery, has any relationship to the giant ground sloth. Amazingly, they are cousins and have evolved tens of millions of years ago from a common ancestor in South America...

Think Big: Large Scale Events at MOAS

The Museum's Education Department has a long history of creating and hosting large events and festivals of all kinds. These mission-driven events follow a curriculum of art, science, and history, or a combination of all three. Planning begins months in advance and involves multiple departments and personnel from the Museum. It is always a team effort between the education department, marketing and public relations, curatorial...

The (Re)Making of a Museum

With the opening of the new guest services expansion, the Museum of Arts & Sciences vaulted to the position of one of the largest museums in the Southeast.

The Unconquered

After the devastation of the Second Seminole War, the remaining members of this proud group of people decided Florida was their home and refused to relocate to the Oklahoma reservations. The Seminoles that live in the Everglades today are the descendants of those unconquered souls. Begining in 1835, the United States Army and its best general attempted to dislodge the Seminoles from their Florida sanctuary. One by one, the highly-touted generals left the new territory defeated...