Astronomy – Shining Achievements of the Natural Sciences

The “science of the stars” begins with observing nature. It deals with what we can see in the sky – both during the day and at night. For example, the rising and setting of the celestial bodies, the seasonal changes in our night sky, the sun, the Earth’s moon, the planets and their moons, comets, the countless other stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the numerous other galaxies.

For millennia, astronomers observed the sky directly with their own eyes. They studied and surveyed the arrangement and movement of the stars precisely. This enabled them to create calendars and to provide travellers with orientation during journeys. The invention of the telescope around 400 years ago, the introduction of photography and spectroscopy in the 19th century and the advent of astronautics in the 20th century have all been milestones for our knowledge about space.

Today, we have an even broader perspective: now, it’s all about the understanding of the universe as a whole, its formation and its structure. Astronomers use telescopes in space for their observations. They pick up radiation that was emitted billions of years ago in the unimaginably distant depths of the universe. Scientific space probes, the Hubble Space Telescope and large telescopes on the ground have given us fantastic images of far-away worlds.

In this exhibition, you can find various themes related to astronomy on three levels: the universe and the night sky, astrophysics and instruments, stellar evolution, amateur astronomy, the sun and the solar system, and cosmology. The exhibition is complemented by a planetarium and two observatories.

• Exhibition area: 1,100 sqm
• Opening of the first Astronomy exhibition: 1925
• The exhibition is on Level 3–5