please empty your brain below
I first went to the RGO on a school trip in 1959. I still have a black and white photo of the whole class standing on the Line. I last visited on a trip to England in 2006.

Michael | 21.02.11 - 8:47 a.m. | #

Hmm, I normally go about twice a year as I too am fascinated by all things space and time. It’s disappointing to see the re-introduction of the entrance fee, although I guess they must need the money. They will probably do fine from tourists, but may well lose some of the local visitors.

Mark Garth | Homepage | 21.02.11 - 9:12 a.m. | #

Pity that they can't do it so a UK passport gets you in for free.
It's probably against some European directive or other crap.

Brad | 21.02.11 - 9:51 a.m. | #

Shame about the Camera Obscura - when it is working there's something very compelling about it. Of all my visit to Greenwich that's the only bit that has really stuck in my memory There's one up here in Dumfries but they only open it up when it isn't raining, which isn't very often.

disgruntled | Homepage | 21.02.11 - 10:15 a.m. | #

you might be interested, DG, to know that the merdian line in Greenwich is little bit of a con-trick... the line that is marked is not actually used as the 0 deg line in ANY current map system.

GPS uses th WGS84 datum, and it's Zero degrees meridian is about 200m away from the strip at greenwich

Meanwhile the British Ordnance survey maps use on of the earlier meridian lines at Greenwich (aligned with an earlier telescope), about 20m from the strip.

So the lead strip is actually a fantasy, a lie even? Plenty of info to say that the 'whole world' reckons longitude from that specific line.. but in reality no one does.

dg writes. Interesting. Previous post about Greenwich's many meridians here.

botogol | 21.02.11 - 10:35 a.m. | #

I wasn’t aware of this, and I’m deeply saddened to hear it. I really enjoy visiting Greenwich, and there still loads of reasons to go (the Old Royal Naval College, the park, National Maritime Museum) but I don’t think I’ll be able to justify £10 to see something I’ve seen many times before. It’s the Camera Obscura that I’ll really miss, though. I’ve always found this breathtaking, that’s it’s just the nature of…er….nature; it’s not the result of some new-fangled process invented by Fuji.

And I like Brad’s idea. I think all of our museums and heritage sites should be free to us Brits. There’s more than enough tourists to pay for the upkeep.

Gerald | Homepage | 21.02.11 - 10:57 a.m. | #

My favourite part of visiting the meridian: seeing tourists jump over the meridian and say they are now in the previous day (or the next day, whichever way they jump). I've seen this happen at least twice and my Dad claims he saw the same when he visited a few years back. Too funny.

Polkatronixx | 21.02.11 - 2:51 p.m. | #

What do you think of the proposals to stop using Greenwich Meantime, even in the winetr? I think it's appalling, and that rather than change the clocks at all, let alone introduce double summer time, we should stick to GMT all the year round and, if necessary, alter the times we do things. Simple, honest and transparent. BST is a con trick.

Sarah | Homepage | 21.02.11 - 5:29 p.m. | #

Patience Sarah, I'll probably write/rant about Double BST soon.

diamond geezer | Homepage | 21.02.11 - 7:20 p.m. | #

I normally visit Greenwich Observatory about 3 times a year, but that will cease when the £10 charge is imposed. I have seen the camera obscura in use at Greenwich, but have not seen the one at Eastbourne (on top of the pier) open in recent years.
I shall probably still make a visit to the top Greenwich hill to look at the view across London, but probably only once a year.
As for leaving GMT and moving forward an hour or two, great, I cannot wait, I prefer the light in the evenings,-not at 5am in the morning. being on the same time as central Europe could also be handy.
I remember the last time we tried it and I enjoyed it then.

John | 21.02.11 - 7:28 p.m. | #

Oh, and by the way the world stopped using GMT in 1928, and now uses Universal Time (UTC and variants), the term GMT is still used though.

John | 21.02.11 - 7:34 p.m. | #

I do hope European continental time, or something like it, comes to Britain - no more GMT darkness by 4 pm. The govt. are voting on this problem - whether to stop turning the clocks back an hour in winter - in a few months' time. The Scots object - but they're semi-independent now and can choose their own time zone.

The Americans must loathe being hours and hours behind the new day in China - they'd love to be able to be complete top dogs and change the equivalent of GMT to American time!

Vivien | 22.02.11 - 12:45 a.m. | #

John - GMT and UTC are two subtly different things. We have a time nerd at work who maintains the clocks, and we have GMT, UTC and Local Time on adjacent digital clocks - and in the summer, they're all different (though GMT and UTC are milliseconds apart).

martin | 22.02.11 - 8:20 a.m. | #

Funnily enough, it was your blog on the new planetarium in 2007 that inspired me to visit the place. this then started up a chain of events that means I am starting a masters in Astrophysics next year - all stemmed from that one trip.

Sarah | 22.02.11 - 9:44 a.m. | #

I followed DG's link (as annotated to botogol's comment above) back to his his previous essay (13/10/2004 !) on the Greenwich Meeridian and lapped up the info on the 4 competing meridians snuggling so closely up to each other, plus the new GPS virtual meridian - why did the GPS people not use one of the pre-existing lines ? sadly some of the photo-links no longer work - lapsed Flickr superscriptions ?

john b | 23.02.11 - 4:35 p.m. | #

john b - you can't base a modern system like GPS on an actual point in the ground : it's too accurate - it would mean a small earthquake in greenwich, moving that particualr spot 20cm, would mean that the precise longitude of every other place in the world would change!
Instead GPS is based on a mathematical model of the earth, providing a shape that is 'best fit' and any one point moving doesn't effect it.

botogol | 24.02.11 - 9:08 a.m. | #

thanks botogol - that's another interesting bit of info - hope I can remember it long enough to impress when showing visitors round Greenwich !..... but....why couldn't they start the GPS system with one of the land-based systems (especially that used by the Ordnance Survey) and just allow the two to drift apart with time ? then at least for a while, pending some "the earth moved" event in Greenwich, GPS users and Ordnance Survey users could stroll hand-in-hand hand with matching read-outs :)

john b | 24.02.11 - 11:27 a.m. | #

well john b, they could have done - but then again why would they? there were no other map systems aligned to that meridien, so they would still have been a 'first'
when I went to greenwich last I asked about this, and the information desk produced an expert who came out and chatted. I asked him if any map system EVER had been based on the particualr meridien today marked with the lead strip, and he conceded that he wasn't aware of any.

so i conclude the whole greenwich set up is actually somewhat dishonest..

botogol | 24.02.11 - 12:53 p.m. | #

DG, I too loved the Greenwich observatory, particularly all the interesting 'accurate clock' stories, but I did find the planetarium to be one of the most disappointing I've ever visited.

DebF | 04.03.11 - 12:42 a.m. | #











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