Given my personal penchant for all things space-related, coupled with an unrivaled obsession for London’s history, it came as a surprise to realise that I’d not visited the Royal Observatory since its new galleries opened two years ago. I got the chance to correct this oversight last week, thanks to the site’s resident astronomer Dr Marek Kukula, who kindly offered to show me around.
Although the Observatory is a stalwart Planck plank in the well-trodden tourist trail, there’s plenty of interest for the genuine scientist. For starters, anyone who has read Dava Sobel’s bestseller will bend over backwards and compromise their own longitude to clap eyes on John Harrison’s four marine chronometers, still in working order in the Time galleries. The other great instrument of note is the 28-inch Great Equatorial refracting telescope. Housed under the famous dome (actually a 1970s pastiche), this remains the largest refracting telescope in the UK, and is still used for educational stargazing purposes (Marek tells me that you can even view stars during the day time under ideal conditions).
The new Astronomy galleries and associated Planetarium are mostly aimed at children and school groups, but contain a few nuggets that will interest the scientific tourist. A small display of meteorites conceals a real treasure: a genuine chunk of Mars rock, blasted from the surface of that planet millennia ago. Such samples are very rare, and it is surprising to find one so casually displayed in an unattended gallery. Downstairs, meanwhile, there’s a new temporary exhibition space currently showing off some of the best eye-candy from the Cassini Saturn mission. The Peter Harrison Planetarium (now London’s only such venue, after Madam Tussauds turned theirs into a celebration of that other kind of star) opened a couple of years ago and uses ‘digital laser projectors’ to provide eyecatching tours of the solar system.
Speaking of lasers, Marek told me an interesting tale about the green beam that shines out of the Observatory each evening to mark the direction of the prime meridian. A recent housing development north of the Thames marketed their luxury apartments as sitting right on that meridian. Unfortunately, they weren’t aware of the laser and, as the apartment block rose up, the developers discovered that the beam was striking their new tower. They asked the Observatory if they could, perhaps, shift the meridian a little to the side so as not to annoy their prospective buyers. Fortunately for all, it turned out that the laser hadn’t been calibrated for a while, and on inspection turned out to be fractionally off course. The beam was corrected, narrowly missing the building, but the developers could no longer legitimately claim to be on the meridian.
As part of the International Year of Astronomy, the Observatory is coordinating a competition to find the best astronomical photographs. You can submit entries up till 19 July. Winners will receive cash prizes, and the best pics will be displayed at the Observatory in September. Further IYA events include sci-fi lectures in September, a Moon Watch in October, and a talk on poetry inspired by astronmy, from Jocelyn Bell Burnell, in November.
Previous installments of the Scientific Tourist in London.