At the end of May, the Queen and some of the great and good assembled at the top of a hill in Greenwich. The location was the Royal Observatory, which is part of London's National Maritime Museum, and the occasion was the opening of its 120-seat planetarium. At the same time and in the same building the Weller Astronomy Galleries opened.
The planetarium, the astronomy galleries and a new learning centre are part of the observatory's £16.5m Time and Space redevelopment. The first phase of this was unveiled last year with the opening of four galleries that told the story of time.
The Weller Astronomy Galleries are billed as helping visitors 'unravel the mysteries of the universe', but unfortunately very small rooms and too much emphasis on the awe and wonder of space get in the way of the science.
The astronomy galleries are housed in what was a working observatory until the Royal Observatory moved to Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex in the 1950s. The building was completed in 1899 and its exterior is a testament to Victorian grandeur. It is an ornate red-brick cruciform building with the names of British astronomers carved on each side, and a golden ship atop the dome.
But once inside you would now be hard pushed to tell you were in an old building. The interior has the feel of a generic exhibition space: white walls, grey floors and false ceilings. There is little indication that this building was ever used for astronomy.
The exhibition is in four rooms on the central level. The first room makes a dramatic start: in the middle of the room is a sign saying: 'This is the oldest object you will ever touch… it is about 4.5 billion years old.' Next to it is what looks like a lump of metal; and in fact that's what it is - part of the Gibeon meteorite composed of iron and nickel. This is interesting and should capture visitors' attention.
But there isn't much else on offer in this room. A video of the earth rotating is projected in one corner of a long screen, and throughout the room there are some noisy whooshing sounds. What is that noise? Surely it's not the sound of space, because there is no sound in space.
The next room is called Astronomy Inspires. Unfortunately it doesn't do anything of the sort. One might expect it to capitalise on the interest sparked by comets; perhaps some exhibits relating to astronomical discoveries or explaining why astronomy is important today (after all, who cares about space?).
Instead there is a big screen showing a computer-generated audiovisual display. In under five minutes this goes from asking viewers to imagine nothingness - 'no light, no dark, no time, no space' - to the big bang, dark energy and the expanding universe, the sun, the solar system, the death of a star and life on other planets. Blimey!
This could be inspirational if it was well explained, but it isn't. There is no time to get to grips with the ideas presented so they remain incomprehensible, and the language of the voice-over presents the universe as a mysterious and powerful entity.
If the aim is to inspire people to be interested in astronomy, as the title implies, surely the key is to let them into the subject not to create the image of something that is difficult or unknowable.
There is one other exhibit in this room. Through the gloom of the dimmed lights, near the entrance, you can see an 18th-century orrery.
A text panel poses the question: 'How many planets are there?' What a shame more isn't made of this. When the orrery was made our solar system was thought to have only five planets; when this exhibition was being developed there were nine planets; today there are only eight after Pluto was demoted last year. If ever there was a way to show how our understanding of the universe is changing, and therefore why astronomy is relevant, surely this is it.
It is important to mention that the rooms are tiny. In the first two rooms this doesn't matter because the exhibits take up so little space. But the final two rooms, Astronomy Explores and Astronomy Questions, are packed with exhibits and are consequently very cramped.
Astronomy Explores is about the tools astronomers use. You can try your hand at using astronomical coordinates, design and launch a space probe and see how different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum show different features of stars and galaxies. It's all a bit brief though and not always well explained.
One graphic attempts simultaneously to explain light years, to show how far away some structures in space are, and show what kinds of instruments were used to discover some of those structures. It's a bit of a mess but is probably a fair reflection of the rest of the room: a lot covered briefly in a very small space.
Things don't improve in the final room. This is dominated by a big multimedia exhibit that projects stars onto a table. If you put a cup-like device over certain stars an audiovisual display runs overhead telling you about the latest thinking on, say, the cosmic microwave background or dark energy. It isn't the most straightforward interactive, and having lots of people standing around it makes it difficult to move around the room.
But it actually highlights a more fundamental flaw in the whole exhibition: it's all very well to talk about these subjects but when visitors are overhead asking each other 'what's a quasar' you realise that the exhibition hasn't introduced any of the fundamentals of astronomy. Dark energy is important and interesting, but for visitors to be enthused they need to understand the basics and the jargon.
It's a shame that a place with such a strong astronomy pedigree hasn't been able to produce an exhibition that moves away from presenting space as mysterious and instead clearly explains the science.
Perhaps trying to cover all these aspects in four very small rooms was just too ambitious. Or perhaps the exhibitions are really a holding space for the main attraction of the planetarium. Either way it needs less mystery and more excitement.
Rachel Souhami is a freelance curator and a lecturer in science
communication at Imperial College London
Project data
Cost: £16.5m for entire Time and Space project
Main funders: Heritage Lottery Fund, DCMS, Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, Peter Harrison Foundation, Lloyds Register Educational Trust, Millennium Commission, Wolfson Foundation, Garfield Weston Foundation, private donations via the Universal Appeal
Architect: Allies and Morrison
The planetarium, the astronomy galleries and a new learning centre are part of the observatory's £16.5m Time and Space redevelopment. The first phase of this was unveiled last year with the opening of four galleries that told the story of time.
The Weller Astronomy Galleries are billed as helping visitors 'unravel the mysteries of the universe', but unfortunately very small rooms and too much emphasis on the awe and wonder of space get in the way of the science.
The astronomy galleries are housed in what was a working observatory until the Royal Observatory moved to Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex in the 1950s. The building was completed in 1899 and its exterior is a testament to Victorian grandeur. It is an ornate red-brick cruciform building with the names of British astronomers carved on each side, and a golden ship atop the dome.
But once inside you would now be hard pushed to tell you were in an old building. The interior has the feel of a generic exhibition space: white walls, grey floors and false ceilings. There is little indication that this building was ever used for astronomy.
The exhibition is in four rooms on the central level. The first room makes a dramatic start: in the middle of the room is a sign saying: 'This is the oldest object you will ever touch… it is about 4.5 billion years old.' Next to it is what looks like a lump of metal; and in fact that's what it is - part of the Gibeon meteorite composed of iron and nickel. This is interesting and should capture visitors' attention.
But there isn't much else on offer in this room. A video of the earth rotating is projected in one corner of a long screen, and throughout the room there are some noisy whooshing sounds. What is that noise? Surely it's not the sound of space, because there is no sound in space.
The next room is called Astronomy Inspires. Unfortunately it doesn't do anything of the sort. One might expect it to capitalise on the interest sparked by comets; perhaps some exhibits relating to astronomical discoveries or explaining why astronomy is important today (after all, who cares about space?).
Instead there is a big screen showing a computer-generated audiovisual display. In under five minutes this goes from asking viewers to imagine nothingness - 'no light, no dark, no time, no space' - to the big bang, dark energy and the expanding universe, the sun, the solar system, the death of a star and life on other planets. Blimey!
This could be inspirational if it was well explained, but it isn't. There is no time to get to grips with the ideas presented so they remain incomprehensible, and the language of the voice-over presents the universe as a mysterious and powerful entity.
If the aim is to inspire people to be interested in astronomy, as the title implies, surely the key is to let them into the subject not to create the image of something that is difficult or unknowable.
There is one other exhibit in this room. Through the gloom of the dimmed lights, near the entrance, you can see an 18th-century orrery.
A text panel poses the question: 'How many planets are there?' What a shame more isn't made of this. When the orrery was made our solar system was thought to have only five planets; when this exhibition was being developed there were nine planets; today there are only eight after Pluto was demoted last year. If ever there was a way to show how our understanding of the universe is changing, and therefore why astronomy is relevant, surely this is it.
It is important to mention that the rooms are tiny. In the first two rooms this doesn't matter because the exhibits take up so little space. But the final two rooms, Astronomy Explores and Astronomy Questions, are packed with exhibits and are consequently very cramped.
Astronomy Explores is about the tools astronomers use. You can try your hand at using astronomical coordinates, design and launch a space probe and see how different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum show different features of stars and galaxies. It's all a bit brief though and not always well explained.
One graphic attempts simultaneously to explain light years, to show how far away some structures in space are, and show what kinds of instruments were used to discover some of those structures. It's a bit of a mess but is probably a fair reflection of the rest of the room: a lot covered briefly in a very small space.
Things don't improve in the final room. This is dominated by a big multimedia exhibit that projects stars onto a table. If you put a cup-like device over certain stars an audiovisual display runs overhead telling you about the latest thinking on, say, the cosmic microwave background or dark energy. It isn't the most straightforward interactive, and having lots of people standing around it makes it difficult to move around the room.
But it actually highlights a more fundamental flaw in the whole exhibition: it's all very well to talk about these subjects but when visitors are overhead asking each other 'what's a quasar' you realise that the exhibition hasn't introduced any of the fundamentals of astronomy. Dark energy is important and interesting, but for visitors to be enthused they need to understand the basics and the jargon.
It's a shame that a place with such a strong astronomy pedigree hasn't been able to produce an exhibition that moves away from presenting space as mysterious and instead clearly explains the science.
Perhaps trying to cover all these aspects in four very small rooms was just too ambitious. Or perhaps the exhibitions are really a holding space for the main attraction of the planetarium. Either way it needs less mystery and more excitement.
Rachel Souhami is a freelance curator and a lecturer in science
communication at Imperial College London
Project data
Cost: £16.5m for entire Time and Space project
Main funders: Heritage Lottery Fund, DCMS, Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, Peter Harrison Foundation, Lloyds Register Educational Trust, Millennium Commission, Wolfson Foundation, Garfield Weston Foundation, private donations via the Universal Appeal
Architect: Allies and Morrison
