NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Office, with help from astrophysicists, created several posters for the Halloween season. These posters feature real events in the cosmos with a touch of fun fanciful fright from classic horror films. With many of the posters, there is also an interactive site to explore the system. It is Halloween fun for the whole family where everyone is secretly learning about space! That is quite a trick!
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On the NASA’s Galaxy of Horrors website we will find six frightful posters made to look like classic horror advertisements. Each poster was meticulously create by scientists to contain facts in the fiction. For example, In the Dark Matter poster, while the spider is fiction the web alludes to the cosmic web. The cosmic web a bunch of invisible threads of matter and dark matter that connects galaxies like the silk of a spider’s web…well that’s what it is in a nut shell. \Read more about the facts and fictions of each poster here.
These posters will make excellent Halloween decorations. We are given high resolution photos that we can have printed and framed to make them last through the years. The posters that are available to download from the Galaxy of Horror Website are:
- Galactic Graveyard
- Dark Matter
- Gamma Ray Ghouls
- Flares of Fury with an interactive exploration of the system
- Zombie Worlds with an interactive exploration of the system
- Rains of Terror with an interactive exploration of the system
There are three other systems we can explore, but there are no posters to download. They are:
- Kepler’s Inferno
- Monster Mash
- Eternal Darkness
I have to admit, my favorite part is the interaction and exploration of the systems. I took a screen shot of what the interactive exploration sites look like. You can click and move the planet around, zoom in and out to get a closer look, check out the system or the star, compare it to other known bodies of mass like Earth or Jupiter, and so much more. It is actually a lot of fun
To get the posters and begin your journey of exploration click the image below. Once the website loads hover over each image and select the task you wish to complete, i.e. download, explore, or read more. Get the whole family involved for a night of frightful fun.
