Legoland California will temporarily close its new Sea Life Aquarium on Tuesday in order to install some new upgrades.

Legoland officials said they rushed to open the aquarium in time for the busy summer season, so they opened it in July with the idea that once peak season ended, they could close it again for improvements. Among the improvements planned are the addition of an interactive sandcastle-building area, improved Lego animation in the underwater Lost City of Atlantis display, new decor for the Lake Tahoe area, remodeling of the aquarium entrance from inside the park and improvements to the audio/visual technology.

Sea Life Aquarium is scheduled to reopen Dec. 26. The aquarium closure does not affect the Legoland California park.

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"Journey to Palomar," the 2006 film documentary about the history of the Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain and its namesake, astrophysicist George Ellery Hale, will make its national television debut next week on PBS stations.

KPBS will air the film (which had its world premiere last year at the Temecula Valley film festival) at 9 p.m. Monday (with a repeat at 3 a.m. Wednesday).

Produced by married L.A. filmmakers Todd and Robin Mason, the film follows the career of Hale (who's considered the father of astrophysics) and his long struggle to build giant telescopes to see deep into the universe. Hale first built the Yerkes observatory in Wisconsin in 1897, then a 60-inch telescope on Mount Wilson near Pasadena in 1908 (light pollution from nearby L.A. made it ineffective by the 1930s). Palomar Mountain was chosen by Hale specifically for its remote location, but he died in 1938 before he could see it come to fruition, and the telescope was named in his honor.

The Hale telescope's 200-inch glass mirror, commissioned in 1934, took more than a year to cool and 13 years to polish and perfect before its perilous journey up Palomar Mountain in 1947.

Visit www.journeytopalomar.org.

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If you like your art in motion, you might enjoy visiting the Escondido Municipal Gallery this month to see Sarah Attwood's "Some Pawns" art installation. The monthlong exhibit is an interactive, electronic artwork that uses 192 chess pawns to simulate massive global population movements through the use of conveyors, pulleys and other mechanical devices.

Along with the persistent motion of pawns, the exhibit includes interactive elements (like cabinets and doors that people can pull open to look inside) to illustrate the transition of the anonymous masses to individual people and their specific migration stories. The exhibit focuses most specifically on the current diaspora of Chinese and Indian populations overseas.

Attwood is an interactive media artist from San Diego with a degree in art and technology from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

Escondido Municipal Gallery is at 262 E. Grand Ave. Call (760) 480-4101.

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"Mother Maple," a whitewashed aluminum sculpture by New York artist Robert Lobe, has been installed on the grounds of the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas.

The 120-inch-tall sculpture, made from heat-treated, hammered aluminum, depicts a tree trunk and a rock. It has been installed near the top of the hillside institute's granite trail and is on loan to the institute through October 2010.

Lobe visited Lux last spring and thought his sculpture -- which was then on exhibit in Palm Springs -- would fit well into the natural landscape of the five-acre Institute, so he gave permission for the piece to be moved to Lux early this month.

"We're honored to display a remarkable work like 'Mother Maple' at Lux," said Reesey Shaw, the institute's director. "Lobe's process and direct work with nature is an interesting counterpoint to our native landscape and the artists working here."

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Westview High School will be mounting one of the most ambitious theater productions in its history this weekend with the opening of William Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

Westview's Carolyn Crowley said the production, which opens Friday, has the largest cast the school has ever assembled for a fall play (30 students and about 30 crew members). The production will also feature original music written by a senior at Westview.

Crowley said the challenge has been teaching the classic dialogue to students who've never performed Shakespeare. To help prepare, the students visited the Old Globe in San Diego to work with an actor who spent the summer performing in the Globe's Summer Shakespeare Festival, and saw one of the festival's productions, "The Merry Wives of Windsor."

The students also got a visit three weeks ago from Vista resident Jonathan McMurty, a veteran of more than 180 Globe productions who teaches Shakespeare for the Globe's MFA program at the University of San Diego.

Performances run through Nov. 15 at Westview, 14500 Camino del Sur in Rancho Bernardo. Call (858) 780-2000 for tickets.

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Richard Wagner's four-opera Ring Cycle isn't staged very often. In the United States, only Seattle Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York produce the epic (and epically expensive) cycle with any regularity.

But on Monday, LA Opera announced plans to produce its first-ever Ring Cycle in 2010 in a citywide festival that will incorporate 50 Los Angeles cultural institutions and organizations.

The announcement was made Monday morning by Placido Domingo, LA Opera's artistic director, and a veteran of many Ring Cycle productions (though he's now 67, Domingo still regularly performs the role of Siegmund in the Cycle's third opera, "Die Walkure," around the world).

The Ring will be the centerpiece of Ring Festival LA, which Domingo described in a statement as "the defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles." The festival (running from April to June 2010) will include exhibits, performances, symposiums and special events sponsored by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and many other organizations.

Ring performances generally sell out a year or two in advance because they are so rare. This will be only the second Ring production ever produced in Southern California (Russia's Kirov Opera presented a touring version at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in 2006). The Cycle will be staged three times in its entirety from May 29-June 26, 2010. The operas (which have a combined 17-hour running time) will be presented on four different nights over a one-week period.

Tickets are already on sale at www.laoperaring.com.

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Pam Kragen is the arts editor of the North County Times.