Note: This column was published in the Barrow Journal on April 23, 2014.

Last week my family ventured down to Macon to visit the Museum of Arts and Sciences. This is the only museum in Georgia that focuses on art and science, and we had a fun time checking it out.

The main brick building is set on fourteen acres of beautiful wooded land with trails and several outbuildings. There are permanent exhibitions, including a three-story “Discovery House” for children and a mini-zoo. In the Discovery House, the boys and I enjoyed looking at their beautiful collection of butterflies, shells, arrowheads and other treasures. There was pottery, artwork and a collection of ship models that must have taken years to put together.

The Discovery House is very interactive for kids too. There were places where the boys could have created some artwork, but they preferred to dig for fossils. They had a blast in the Light Box, and we also had fun pretending we were weather forecasters, standing in front of a green screen and seeing our images on a screen with a weather map behind us.

The mini-zoo is small, but it contains more than seventy animals, including amphibians, birds, invertebrates, mammals and reptiles. This made my snake loving seven-year-old very happy. We were also able to catch part of a live animal show, which is a regular feature of the museum, and afterward my boys got to touch some of the animals.

The art exhibits were more appealing to my husband and me, but luckily the boys didn’t rush us too much. We especially enjoyed their large display of antique quilts, which is a temporary exhibit. Many of them were from Georgia quilt makers, and the details and craftsmanship were incredible.

By far our favorite part of the museum was its planetarium. We have been to two other planetariums, and this was the best. After reading the museum’s website, I understand why.

In 2012, the museum became one of the few planetariums in the world to install the Konica Minolta Super MediaGlobe II, which is “the highest-resolution and brightest, single-projector digital planetarium available today.” This museum is the first to install this system in Georgia and only the third in the Americas. The resolution is supposed to be four times higher than of the best HDTV images – that’s impressive.

It was worth the drive just to see the two shows we attended. They were under thirty minutes each, but they were stunning, beautiful and very educational. I learned so much in such a short amount of time! Each show included some animation, so they were entertaining for the children as well.

My four-year-old got scared in the opening of the first show we saw, titled “Stars.” Later we were told that this show was the most intense. It begins as the camera moves in on a star, and my son had never experienced such a huge screen that encompassed our entire vision before. Later he told me that he thought we were all going to be swallowed! That is definitely the feeling you get as you sit under that huge dome and the “star” is moving toward you. I thought I was going to have to leave with him, but I calmed him down and he enjoyed the rest of the show. By the second show, he was an old pro.

If you would like to visit the museum, it is open Tuesday-Saturday from 10-5pm and Sunday 1-5pm. It is closed on Mondays. The admission price is very reasonable and includes all the exhibitions, mini-zoo, discovery house and the planetarium. It’s $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and military, $7 for students, $5 for children, and children under 3 are free.

It took us about two hours to drive there. For directions, be sure to check the map on the museum’s website. When we got near the facility, we discovered that the directions from Google maps had one mistake. (We never found a Hall Road. Use Wimbish Road instead.) The website is www.masmacon.org.