Didn’t get a ticket to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson? Here’s your fix

Pop culture’s most famous astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, is visiting Ovens Auditorium Thursday for a sold-out show. Buoyed by his widely-followed tweets about films ranging from Sandra Bullock’s “Gravity” to Matt Damon’s recent hit “The Martian,” Tyson will use his love of movies as a jumping-off point for a freewheeling discussion about life, the universe, and everything else.

If you’ve missed your shot at a seat but you want to see why he’s been so successful at bringing the Milky Way into living rooms across America, here are a few ways you can feel like you were there:

1. Watch “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.” Tyson’s reboot of the science-based series originated by his onetime mentor Carl Sagan won a few Emmys after it aired in 2014, and there’s talk of a Season 2. It’s out on DVD, or watch highlight clips on the National Geographic website (natgeotv.com).

2. Catch “StarTalk.” From the beloved podcast to a multi-season National Geographic Channel TV series, Tyson is joined by comedians and guests ranging from “Star Trek’s” George Takei to former President Bill Clinton to Reddit co-founder Alex O’Hanian for discussions of the intersections of science and our culture. Listen at startalkradio.net.

3. Grab some popcorn and enjoy some sci-fi. “Interstellar,” “The Matrix,” and “Contact” rank among his favorites.

4. Follow him on Twitter at @NeilTyson. His reputation for mingling science with film criticism took off with his 2013 series of “Mysteries of #Gravity” tweets such as “Why Bullock's hair, in otherwise convincing zero-G scenes, did not float freely on her head.”

More recently he has weighed in on Ben Affleck’s latest effort: “In @BatmanvSuperman, I've gotta side with Superman. He’s a space alien from an exoplanet. In astrophysics, that’s how we roll.”

This story was originally published April 19, 2016 at 10:43 AM with the headline "Didn’t get a ticket to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson? Here’s your fix."