Founded in 1869, this classic museum contains a veritable wonderland of more 30 million artifacts, including lots of menacing dinosaur skeletons, as well as the Rose Center for Earth & Space, with its cutting-edge planetarium. From October through May, the museum is home to the Butterfly Conservatory, a glass-house featuring 500-plus butterflies from all over the world.

On the natural history side, the museum is perhaps best known for its Fossil Halls, containing nearly 600 specimens on view, including the skeletons of a massive mammoth and a fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex.

There are also plentiful animal exhibits (the stuffed Alaskan brown bear is popular), galleries devoted to gems and an IMAX theater that plays films on natural phenomena. The Milstein Hall of Ocean Life contains dioramas devoted to ecologies, weather and conservation, as well as a beloved 94ft replica of a blue whale. At the 77th St Lobby Gallery, visitors are greeted by a 63ft canoe carved by the Haida people of British Columbia in the middle of the 19th century.

For the space set, it’s the Rose Center that is the star of the show. With its mesmerizing glass box facade, home to space-show theaters and the planetarium – it is indeed an otherworldly setting. Every half-hour between 10:30am and 4:30pm, you can drop yourself into a cushy seat to view Journey to the Stars, which charts the life and death of astral bodies using telescopic images and hallucinatory visualizations – the sort of thing that will have you exclaiming, 'Whoaaaaaa.'

Needless to say, the museum is a hit with kids, and as a result, it’s swamped on weekends. Early on a weekday is the best time to go.