The National Observatory

Anna and I straddling the Prime Meridian. We were on the east side and the west side.

The area of London where we live is not too far from another area called Greenwich. You may recognize this from time zones in relation to Greenwich Mean Time. This is where the prime meridian of the earth is and from where all the time zones originate.

A little bit of history. Way back when people were sailing around the world, they didn't have an accurate way to measure longitude. This was a big problem as ships kept hitting things and sinking. The king at the time decided enough was enough and they needed to crack the code so to speak so he issued a challenge to try to find a way to figure it out. The guy who ended up doing it was based in Greenwich at the observatory so they gave him the distinction of being the zero.

Me with the clock. It was cold so I used my scarf to keep my head warm. I felt like I was in the Middle East.

Now, you can go visit the observatory where we worked. It's set up as a museum now and we visited it a couple of times. The first time, it was already closed so we just looked in from the outside. We were able to see a clock that had some big historic significance (I don't remember what it is just now) and the standards for various lengths. The second time we went in and had a look around. Mostly it was a lot of old astronomical equipment which was interesting. Then there were rooms that talked a whole lot about time and clocks and that was where I started to loose interest. For some reason I don't understand, we weren't allowed to take pictures in the museum so we don't have any picture of that part.

Jason comparing his foot to the foot marker. They seem to be the same size.

Naturally, the prime meridian is very well marked. They have a laser that shoots out of the building and a line on the ground of the courtyard where people line up to take their picture with it. We kept quoting Robin Hood: Men in Tights to ourselves "I'm on the east side, I'm on the west side". We crack ourselves up. There is also a clock that is counting up from the millennium. Apparently, before the millennium, it counted down.

The laser coming out of the building with the digital counting up clock. This was at dusk. When we went back during the day, you couldn't see the laser.

The observatory is at the top of a good size hill in a big park and the view is phenomenal. You can see the Maritime Museum at the bottom of the hill, the Millennium dome to the right, Canary Wharf in the middle and the river Thames. As you can tell, it was a pretty gray day when we went the first time and it was getting dark but it was still a great view. Then we went down the hill and walked along the river by the Greenwich University. Because it was night time and quite cloudy, you could still see the laser. I thought that was pretty cool.

The laser by one of the buildings of the University. I wonder how far you can see it?