Nagoya Science Museum, Aichi

We make another day trip to Nagoya and check out the Nagoya City Science Museum.

Nagoya City Science Museum

We headed out to Nagoya around lunch time and had a quick bowl of ramen along the way. The museum has a large sphere at the top center of the building, which houses a large planetarium. One of the key focuses of the museum is space, and we were pretty excited to see a large rocket sitting out in front.

Once inside, we headed up to the planetarium for a show about the current constellations and planets that are visible in the night sky. The seats were pretty comfortable and spread out 360 around the room, centered around the planetarium ball that projects the night sky. The final part of the show zoomed us out of our solar system and out of the Milky Way galaxy, local cluster and further out to give us a feeling of how far things are. Pretty neat trick!

We entered a floor with a bit of history on the planetarium, and the old original projector that looked very steam punk. That must have been some magical tech and quite expensive back in the day.

The rest of the floor had some replicas of old telescopes, and some simulations of looking at distant stars via telescope sizes. This telescope size comparison display was cool, especially since it included the JWST next to the Hubble.

Downstairs, they had a temporary “gems” exhibit. They had a collection of jewels from various European royalty, which was pretty classy. M really liked the tiaras.

After a long day at the museum, it’s fun to watch the train conductor do his thing and take us home into the sunset.

Summary

The museum is hard to miss, with the huge ball of a planetarium. There were other floors that included a miniature of the city with n-gauge model trains, an artificially created tornado and many interactive exhibits. The price would have been really cheap too, at about 800 yen per adult ($6 USD) for admission and planetarium. We added the gem exhibit, and that was relatively more expensive, so the total was about 2200 yen ($15 USD). I don’t think the gems were worth it, especially if you’ve been to Europe and seen the collections there. That being said, the rest of the museum felt really modern and was fun for the whole family. I would highly recommend it if you’re in Nagoya!