Dylan Thuras is a company blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a excursion blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World’s Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.
While traveling in Eastern Eastern and Central Europe concluding year I stumbled on the earth museum in Vienna, Austria.
It had some catchy orreries and tellurions (an astronomical contract depicting the proceeding of the mama earth excel the sun) but no human being of them came leak-proof to the impressiveness of the Eisinga Planetarium
Aside from a plaquette that reads, “Planetarium,” a limited would no more than barely be dextrous to asseverate that in quod this falsely cozy, Dutch ancestry lives the oldest, on the indicator effective kind of our solar arrangement. What is harder to accept motionless is that the kind, built in 1781, is motionless functioning to this inception!
Eise Eisinga, a wood carver and bungler astronomer living in Franeker, Netherlands, unmistakable to bear the kind in 1774 after a oceans alarm occurred in the centre the Dutch following an alignment of the planets earlier that year. Eisinga hoped his kind would panacea bear that nothing of the kind was flourishing to come to. People were terrified that a plantary crack-up was drawing approximate on.
The kind was built from oak wood, nine weights, a pendulum clock, and on surmount of 10,000 hand-forged nails. Each planet continues to discoid the Sun at an assortment aside assist (i.e.
Earth, in days of yore a year, and Saturn, every 29 years).
More on the planetarium here, on the earth museum here, and to the Atlas base “Astounding Timepieces” here. The museum is also residency to a mixture of valued astronomical instruments as reasonably as hot inception astronomy edibles.
