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Pool the photographic resources of nearly 20 galleries, museums, observatories, and research centers. Craft a stylish browser that viewers can use to hop from image to image, tagging those they like, zooming in on details, and accessing background information with the click of a mouse. Do all that, and you get the Smithsonian Photography Initiative. Designed to "open new doors" to the museum's vast collections of photos, this online venture encourages you to feel at home with pictures from the earliest days of camera portraiture to today's unposed shots. In one visit, we skipped from a dignified 1898 platinum print of a Sioux Indian to a 2001 smudgy snap of a black widow pulsar from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. We took in photos of blues musicians, documentary images from South Africa in the mid-1940s, and a sun-shot reflection of soldiers writing home in 1918. And that was just the beginning.

Next time you find yourself limping at the end of the day and cursing your Manolos or Jimmys, take a virtual step into the Bata Shoe Museum to see how much worse it could have been. The museum's online collections chronicle the evolution of sandals, slippers, clogs, and boots from around the world over the past 4500 years. Check out the predecessors of super-trendy Ugg boots in the Circumpolar group, Syrian kabkabs with mother-of-pearl inlay in the Ethnologial collection, or Elton John's silver and red platforms in the Walk of Fame. Think you know a thing or two about shoes through the ages? The fun facts quiz will help determine if you're a true Imelda-in-training.

Most museums celebrate and enlighten the past. But Seattle's Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame encourages visitors to revisit a fantastical future. It's the one we grew up with in books, movies, and TV, and the SFM's mission is to showcase Sci-Fi's enduring archetypes and artifacts. Its otherworldly exhibits feature everything from sass-talking simian Dr. Zaius, to a bug-eyed bevy of killer bots, to a salute to the Azimovs, Shelleys, and other visionaries who lived ahead of their time. Of course, the thrill of Sci-Fi is in imagining that make-believe could someday happen. So for a treat (or perhaps a dose of reality), check out the infamous terraforming debate swirling around Mars. When hard science collides with hardcore obsessions, expect ripples in our universe.