Cade Museum and other businesses present the Wandering the Milky Way Planetary Partnership Scavenger Hunt

August 5, 2022

Press release from the Cade Museum

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Adventurous explorers are invited to participate in a unique city-wide scavenger hunt that is truly out of this world! The Cade Museum of Creativity and Invention is partnering with seven local businesses across Gainesville to help the public visualize the enormous scale of our Milky Way galaxy. The cosmic collaboration is a physical extension of the museum’s current exhibit, “Wandering the Milky Way,” which runs through January 2023.

The Cade serves as the headquarters and first stop on the space-themed scavenger hunt, though players can visit the various stops in any order. As guests enter the museum’s Rotunda, the first thing they see is a scale model of the solar system, plus the dwarf planet Pluto. Text on the display explains that although the planets are in scale to each other, they are too close together. That’s because space is so big that, even at a smaller scale, the planets are very far apart.

To make a map of the solar system that’s truly in scale, the Cade needed to place the planets not just in different locations within the museum but in seven different locations around the City of Gainesville. Every business participating in the Planetary Partnership Scavenger Hunt represents a different planet and its relative distance from the sun. Scavenger hunt players will find a sign at each stop with educational information about a planet and a QR code that leads to a raffle entry form. Four raffle winners will be drawn during the initiative.

Stops on the scavenger hunt include:

The Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention
The Cade Annex
Depot Park
1st Magnitude
Goldie’s
Thomas Center
Santa Fe College Teaching Zoo
Kanapaha Gardens
Publix at Esplanade at Butler Plaza

Inquisitive explorers are invited to continue their tour of the solar system by visiting the “Wandering the Milky Way” exhibit at the Cade where they can meet the inventors who’ve used robots, rockets, and rovers to take the people of Earth on a tour of the planets and discover how a new generation of innovators is sending us out of the solar system into the space between the stars.