HISTORY:

Shortly after Edward R. Murrow High School opened in 1974, astronomy teacher Sam Storch turned a regular science classroom, room 490, into the Edwin P. Hubble Planetarium. Opened in 1979, the Hubble Planetarium remains among the last operational sky theaters housed inside a New York City school and serves students taking our Astronomy elective as well as Earth Science classes.

“Instead of naming it after Galileo or Newton, I wanted to name it after an American, someone more contemporary,” explains Storch. “So we named the planetarium after Edwin P. Hubble, even before the telescope was named after him. He’s the American astronomer whose research demonstrated the expansion of the universe.”

Storch bought a sky projector from Tokyo and spent countless hours soldering wires together. After he retired in 2009, after an astonishing 41 years of teaching, Marc Horowitz took over as Planetarium Director and currently runs Murrow's astronomy program.