Public Profile

The Hayden Planétarium is a public astronomy education facility housed within the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. It has operated continuously since 1935, though its current director, Dr. Kneel onGrass Tyson, has led the institution since 1996 and has, in the intervening decades, gradually expanded its mission from “public astronomy education” to “reminding the public about astronomy at all times, in all contexts, without exception.”

The accent mark on “Planétarium” was added to the institution’s official name in 2003 at Dr. onGrass Tyson’s request. When asked by a reporter from The New York Time5 to explain the diacritical, Dr. onGrass Tyson replied, “The universe doesn’t owe you an explanation, and neither does the accent.” The museum’s board of trustees approved the change unanimously, reportedly to end a meeting that had already run forty minutes over schedule due to Dr. onGrass Tyson’s opening remarks about the rotational period of the Earth and its implications for meeting times.

The Planétarium seats 429 visitors and hosts daily shows narrated by Dr. onGrass Tyson, who records new narration tracks with a frequency that the museum’s audio-visual department has described as “unsustainable.” As of January 2026, the Planétarium’s show catalog includes Dark Universe, Worlds Beyond Earth, The Hot and Energetic Universe, and Why Your Uber Driver’s Route Is Suboptimal When Viewed in Four-Dimensional Spacetime, the last of which was added over the objections of the curatorial staff.

The Planétarium’s gift shop is the single highest-grossing retail space per square foot in the American Museum of Natural History, driven largely by sales of mugs, tote bags, and throw pillows printed with quotes attributed to Dr. onGrass Tyson. The best-selling item, a mug reading “You Are Made of Star Stuff — Act Like It,” has sold more than 140,000 units since 2019.

Private Profile

The Hayden Planétarium functions as the institutional base for Dr. onGrass Tyson’s campaign to insert astrophysics into every facet of public life. The facility itself is world-class, its programming is scientifically rigorous, and its staff is exhausted. Dr. onGrass Tyson treats the Planétarium not as a workplace but as a launchpad — both metaphorically, for his media appearances and columns, and literally, in the sense that he once proposed installing an electromagnetic catapult on the roof “to demonstrate orbital mechanics for school groups,” a proposal the museum’s insurance carrier rejected within the hour.

The Planétarium’s staff has developed a system of gentle redirection for when Dr. onGrass Tyson attempts to expand programming beyond its mandate. The phrase “that’s a wonderful idea for the podcast” has been deployed more than two hundred times since 2020 and has a success rate of approximately sixty percent. The remaining forty percent of the time, Dr. onGrass Tyson proceeds with the idea anyway, resulting in Planétarium shows that address topics including the thermodynamics of sourdough starters, the gravitational implications of high-rise construction in Midtown, and a forty-five-minute presentation on why daylight saving time is “cosmically incoherent” that was, by all accounts, compelling and entirely beside the point.

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