Chabot Space & Science Center

Chabot Space & Science Center is a non-profit organization and community resource located on 13 acres in Redwood Regional Park in Oakland, in the middle of the largest coastal redwood stand in the East Bay. Chabot has a fully-fledged, 241-sit, immersive and hands-on galleries, space objects, a large screen theatre, Challenger Learning Center and the only research-level telescopes open to the public daily for weekly live viewing in the West.

Situated in Oakland , California, the Chabot Space and Science Center is an immersive science learning facility with interactive exhibits, planetariums, a big screen theatre, hands-on activities and three powerful telescopes.

The Center is the continuation and expansion of a public observatory that has been providing astronomy and science education programs to schools and citizens of the San Francisco Bay Area since 1883. It was named after Anthony Chabot, the founder of hydraulic mining and benefactor of the Oakland Observatory. The Center has been in Redwoods Regional Park on the west coast since 2000.

The institution began as the Oakland Observatory in 1883 through a gift to the City of Oakland from Anthony Chabot. The Oakland Observatory was originally located in Oakland city center and provided the community with a Public Telescope view. For decades, it was also the official timekeeping station for the whole of the Bay Area and its transit telescope measured time.

In 1915, because of increasing light pollution and urban congestion the observatory moved into its Mountain Boulevard site. The facilities were extended substantially in the mid-1960s. The Chabot Science Center, as it was rebuilt, was primarily made up of staff and volunteers from Oakland Unified School District. Seismic safety issues terminated access to the original observatory facilities by the public school students in 1977. The observatory was open to everyone, but the school operation was limited to the outlying buildings of the classrooms and the planetarium.

In 1989, Chabot Observatory & Science Center, in partnership with Eastbay Astronomical Society, was established in recognition of the need for complete access to a facility, either through restoration or relocation and was acknowledging it as a charitable organisation, as a joint power agency with the City of Oakland, the Oakland Unified School District and the East Bay Regional Park District. The project was headed by Dr. Michael D. Reynolds, Chabot ‘s CEO, and the construction of a new Science Center (88,200 square-foot) began in May of 1998. The project took place in October 1996.

The company changed its name from Chabot Observatory & Science Center to Chabot Space & Science Centre in January 2000, announcing the opening of a new building. The company has picked the new name to better reflect its emphasis on astronomy and space science, thus communicating the wide variety of programs offered at the new Science Centre.

The Chabot Space & Science Centre, which opened on August 19, 2000, has a size of 86,000 square feet (8,000 m2) on a 13-acre (53,000 m2) sight in Oakland , California, which is a cutting edge science and engineering education facility. The museum used to be an affiliate of Smithsonian Affiliations but is not a member of the network anymore.

Chabot’s mission is to inspire and educate learners of all ages about the Universe and Planet Earth.