VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Houston Museum of Natural Science Burke Baker Planetarium presents Force 5.  Feel the Fury! Get ready to take cover when you see nature go "Force Five", from Houston Museum of Natural Science and Rice University.

Extreme weather takes center stage in this full dome animated show revealing images not seen by naked eye due to their life-threatening nature. Using real movies and NASA based images, Force Five offers the audience a vantage that would never be safe in the real world, creating a sense of what it would look and feel like if you were standing in the middle of a deadly storm.

The show begins by stepping back in time to 1900, when the great hurricane swept through Galveston, killing over 6,000 men, women, and children in one night of terror. Homes collapsed under the incredible force of torrential winds, powerful rain and rising water.

The 22-minute show then travels to Oklahoma City, where a force five tornado ripped through the town in 1999. These violent and unpredictable storms turn flying debris into lethal weapons. While only one percent of tornadoes reach this force, the Oklahoma City storm tracked wind gusts of 318 miles per hour, the fastest wind speed ever recorded on Earth. A fulldome animation then puts you into a realistic storm.

The final journey of Force Five transports the audience to the surface of the sun, where the most powerful storms in the solar system occur. The violent force of these solar events equals the energy output of a million hydrogen bombs. A coronal mass ejection can create disturbances that damage spacecraft, disrupt communications, and disable power grids here on Earth. Without the protection of Earth's magnetic field, these storms would destroy most life on the planet.