Kaohsiung Astronomical Museum

The Kaohsiung Astronomical Museum is located in Kaohsiung City's Hsiaokang District, within the Kangho Elementary School. Established in 2000, it is the city's first astronomical museum.

The museum's location enables it to avoid the light pollution downtown and achieve the best viewing results. Rather than focusing on the research of astronomy, the museum is dedicated to the promotion and teaching of astronomical science. Its main facilities include a multimedia astronomic hall equipped with a 5-meter-diameter sky screen, as well as an astronomical science exhibition hall that presents displays on four themes. These themes are the "past and present of cosmological views", the "solar family", the "life of fixed stars", the "constellations of the four seasons" (the Leo of Spring, the Scorpios of Summer, the Pegasus of Autumn, and the Orion of Winter).

To facilitate the teaching of astronomy, the museum has also created a 2-meter-diameter constellation map -- the largest ever created in Mandarin -- and many interesting interactive computer games. Of these, the most popular with kids is the "outer space bathroom scale". The scale measures one's weight and converts it into what one would weigh on different planets by comparing the mass and gravity of the specific planets to those of the Earth. Another precious equipment owned by the museum is the NT$6 million Temma Mewlon 300mm reflector telescope, the best telescope ever owned by organizations other than the academic research institutions in Taiwan.