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Touching down at the north end of the sprawling American Museum of Natural History, the Rose Center stands in stark contrast to the Classical architecture of the institute’s main building: A 120-foot-high all-glass cube supported by stainless-steel girders and housing an 87-foot-tall white orb initially registers as a docking bay for a spacecraft. Inside the encased globe, there’s the 420-seat Hayden Planetarium upstairs and, in the lower hemisphere, the Big Bang Theater. In this latter space, patrons peer down at a concave screen while the noble voice of poet Maya Angelou describes the cosmic explosion. (Upstairs it’s Robert Redford.) No opportunity to educate is bypassed: Even the spiraling exit ramp charts 13 billion years of stellar evolution with all of human history spanning a mere hairsbreadth at the end of the path. Bathed in sunlight on the lower level—in the Hall of the Universe—model planets and a life-sized replica of Mars Rover compete for your attention with two 10-foot-tall images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and a 13.5-foot-long screen for late-breaking astronomical news. The 15.5-ton Willamette meteorite weighing as much as five school busses is equally hard to ignore. — Megan Mansell Williams

Major NASA events like the Space Shuttle Return to Flight are broadcast live at the Rose Center.