“We had been doing astronomy for young people,” Roy Clare said at the opening of London's new planetarium, “but we'd been doing it with an apple, an orange and a torch.”
Take away some of Clare's rhetorical whimsy – surely other fruits were involved in the astronomy lessons – and the fact remains that the old planetarium, tucked under a dome in a lesser outbuilding on the grounds of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, had outlived its usefulness. Not as old as Betelgeuse, but getting there.
Now, London has the new, 120-seat, $30-million Peter Harrison Planetarium, built on the same storied grounds that the observatory people like to call “the centre of world time and space” – the home of Greenwich Mean Time and the prime meridian. The planetarium is literally shiny and new, thanks to the eight millimetres of bronze cladding wrapped around its cone.
Yes, a cone: The planetarium's architects, Allies and Morrison, discarded the traditional dome shape and went instead, on the advice of former senior astronomer Robin Catchpoole, with a truncated cone shape.
“He came up with that after the third pint in the pub,”says Clare, director of Greenwich's National Maritime Museum, which oversees the planetarium.
But Catchpoole, with the sobriety of a lifelong scientist, sets the record straight: “I actually thought of it while I was walking on Blackheath [a field behind the observatory].”
Catchpoole draws a diagram in a reporter's notebook to demonstrate the cone's astronomical significance: Its south face points to the Pole star, its north face to the astronomical zenith, it is tilted at 51.5 degrees (Greenwich's latitude) and the slice that's cut from its top parallels the equator.
This, clearly, is part of the lesson schoolchildren will hear in the years to come, although they probably will be more dazzled by the planetarium's new Digistar 3 Laser, with its Star Wars name and its ability to create truly eye-popping effects, from stars going supernova to the sight of our own sun flaming out in a blaze of glory millions of years hence. (Small and sensitive children might be a little unsettled by this – just try explaining to a five-year-old that the sun's not going to wink out tomorrow.)
It's a bold move to build a planetarium these days, considering that the sun seems to have set on the idea. Toronto's McLaughlin Planetarium is long shuttered and possibly headed for condo-ization, and Madame Tussauds in London just closed its star gallery.
“It's a very solid business decision from our point of view,” Clare says.
“The audience is here, and when they come here, they want to learn about the history of time and space.”
The Royal Observatory draws just under a million visitors a year; Clare hopes that young stargazers will increase that number.
Adults hoping to revisit trippy nights of Laser Floyd and Laser Zeppelin (a staple of the old Toronto planetarium) will have to seek their nostalgic high elsewhere. London is about education, with some fun tossed in.
“Education and entertainment are capable of being linked,” Clare says, even as he raises an eyebrow at the mere thought of Laser Floyd. “If you do one well, you can do both well.”
The planetarium could not have a more historically resonant location. Standing on a high hill overlooking the Thames, with historical London in the foreground and the skyscrapers of new London in the distance, the worlds of time, navigation, war and architecture collide. From the summit you look down on the Queen's House, designed by Inigo Jones; just in front is Christopher Wren's Royal Observatory. Precisely at 1 p.m. every day, a red ball is still dropped from a tower atop the house of John Flamsteed, the first royal astronomer. Originally, the ball helped navigators steer their ships through the Thames; now the river is filled with booze cruisers and tour boats that don't require the assistance, but the ball still stubbornly drops after midday.
From the top of the hill you can just make out the sad, burnt remains of the famous tea clipper Cutty Sark, which caught fire last month while under renovation. The Cutty Sark's guardians have promised to rebuild, and perhaps they can take inspiration from the people at the planetarium, who took an orange, an apple and a torch and turned them into a 21st-century digital laser.
The easiest way to get to the Peter Harrison Planetarium is either by riverboat or by taking the Docklands Light Railway to Cutty Sark for Maritime Greenwich; for more information, call 44 (0)20 8312 8565 or visit www.nmm.ac.uk/astronomy/planetarium.html.
