Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="430" caption="Janet Solinger, Director of the Resident Associates Program (RAP), outside the Smithsonian Institution Building (SIB), also known as the "Castle," 1983, by Nora Kengle, Photographic print, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 371, Box 4, Folder: January 1983, Negative Number: 2002-32291."][/caption]
Description: The first thing that I thought of when we started discussing our new call for entry, "seeing other worlds," was Google Earth. When Google Earth first came out in 2004, I remember the novelty of being able to zoom into my hometown to point out details to college friends, and having them pan across their own homes and favorite travel spots. We could travel across the globe
Description: On the evening of October 1, 1847, while using a small telescope on the roof of the family home, Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) spotted a comet where one had not been before. Word of this achievement spread quickly through the scientific community. The American Journal of Science declared her “the first American entitled to the honor of the original discovery of a comet.” Some
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="442" caption="George S. Switzer, first Chairman of the Department of Mineral Sciences, 1963-1968, and Associate Curator, 1948-1956, with some objects from the collections at the National Museum of Natural History, Date unknown, c. 1960s, by Unidentified photographer, Photographic print, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95,
Description: At a September 27, 1931, symposium about the evolution of the universe, Watson Davis photographed astronomer Abbé Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, astrophysicist Edward Arthur Milne, and Anglican bishop and mathematician Ernest William Barnes.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="367" caption="A diorama of Andrew Ellicott and his assistant Benjamin Banneker taking a break from surveying the boundaries of Washington, D.C., in "Laying out the Nation's Capital" in the Hall of Physical Sciences, 1966, by Unidentified photographer, Black and white photographic print, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95,