The Peter Harrison Planetarium is a 120-seat digital laser planetarium, situated in

Greenwich Park Greenwich Park is a former hunting park in Greenwich and one of the largest single green spaces in south-east London. One of the Royal Parks of London, and the first to be enclosed (in 1433), it covers , and is part of the Greenwich World Heritag ...

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

and is part of the

National Maritime Museum The National Maritime Museum (NMM) is a maritime museum in Greenwich, London. It is part of Royal Museums Greenwich, a network of museums in the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. Like other publicly funded national museums in the Unite ...

. It opened on 25 May 2007. The planetarium uses

Digistar 3 Evans & Sutherland is a pioneering American computer firm in the computer graphics field. Its current products are used in digital projection environments like planetariums. Its simulation business, which it sold to Rockwell Collins, sold produc ...

software with blue, red and green lasers and grating light valve (GLV) technology to create a 4,000 pixel strip. This strip is swept to produce a 5,000 by 4,000 pixel image, refreshed 60 times per second. The image is projected through a

fisheye lens A fisheye lens is an ultra wide-angle lens that produces strong visual distortion intended to create a wide panoramic or hemispherical image. Fisheye lenses achieve extremely wide angles of view, well beyond any rectilinear lens. Instead of p ...

onto the dome of the planetarium. This planetarium is housed inside a 45-ton bronze-clad truncated cone, with the north side tilted at 51.5^o to the horizontal (the latitude of Greenwich), the south side pointing at the local Zenith (i.e. at 90 degrees to the local horizon) and the top being slanted to be parallel to the celestial equator. The construction stands parallel to (but 50 metres east of) the

prime meridian A prime meridian is an arbitrary meridian (a line of longitude) in a geographic coordinate system at which longitude is defined to be 0°. Together, a prime meridian and its anti-meridian (the 180th meridian in a 360°-system) form a great ...

. It was conceived under the then Director, Roy Clare CBE, as the centrepiece of the "Time and Space" project, a £17.7m re-development of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and funded with a £3.25m grant from the Peter Harrison Foundation.''£3m pledge by Peter Harrison Foundation secures re-development of Royal Observatory, Greenwich''
; National Maritime Museum press release; November 2005

References

External links

Planetarium shows
Royal Museums Greenwich Planetaria in the United Kingdom Buildings and structures in the Royal Borough of Greenwich Tourist attractions in the Royal Borough of Greenwich Royal Observatory, Greenwich {{london-struct-stub

See also

References

External links