7Feb2009: Day 257: Royal Observatory and Queen's House

Let me start of by saying that a long time member of Good Shepherd (my home church) died today, Jeanette Ricker. I gave her rides to Church back when she could still go, so we were quite close then. She was an extremely nice lady and I will miss her greatly. She had been up in a nursing home in Albany for the last what must be close to 2 years since she fell and broke her neck. Her husband Charlie taught my brother and me how to tie our ties one Christmas Eve service back when we were kids. Here is a picture of her from back at Christmas that Fr. Matt at Good Shepherd sent out after she received a care package from the women at Church. I'm sure she is happy to be back with Charlie in heaven. Good Bye Jeanette, I will miss you!

Today we went to the Royal Observatory and Queen's House in Greenwich. It is part of the National Maritime Museum, but we didn't go into that as Teri doesn't like that stuff and Makenna really is no fun in Museums, unless she is asleep.

It was only an hour away from home, so it was a relatively easy driving day, which is nice. I've been doing a lot of driving lately, so it was good to take it more easy today.

We went into the Queen's house first and it was really just a place they hang pictures. Apparently, King Henry VIII was born there or something. It was a Tudor palace that over the years had been a the home for various kings and supporters. It eventually became a hospital for a time. Makenna enjoyed running away from us and getting into trouble there and we soon left.

We headed up the back which was a long slope up to the Royal Observatory, which has been a museum since the mid-1950's. This is the place where the Prime meridian goes through. They have a laser that shoots out of one room that travels for 15 miles that draws the line in the sky. They have this metal line and statue that laid along the line as well. This is one of several places that over the years was called zero longitude. But, they finally agreed on the Greenwich line. So, that is why we call it Greenich Mean Time from which all other time in the world is based.

There was a lot of old telescopes and such there. But what was the most interesting part was the story of how the solved the "longitudinal problem". Apparently, they had a big problem with ships running aground and many ships were lost because didn't have a good way of knowing their longitude. There was one example of the path a captain took looking for land because he was lost after he crossed around the bottom of south America. It was crazy how close he came to land only to turn around and head back out to sea.

They could measure their lattitude easily enough by measuring the angle from the horizon to the sun when it was noon. But, the longitude is not as easy. The way it had to be done was to acurately know your time at your "home" position and compare it to the time at your current location. Fifteen Degrees of Longitude is equal to one hour of time difference. So the problem was to make an accurate time piece such that you could always know your "home" time to compare against. King Charles II issued a reward of £20,000 to the first person to solve the problem. He started the Royal Observatory to chart the position of the stars with respect to the moon to attempt to solve the problem such that sailors could compare the moons position relative to stars and get an estimate of their time difference. But, what the really needed was an accurate clock that would work on a ship. Unfortunately, the accurate clocks were pendulum clocks which must remain still to be accurate and the rocking of the ship would throw it off.

John Harrison was a joiner who became interested in the workings of clocks and had various attempts at making a clock that would work on ships, his 4th attempt in 35 years finally won him the £20,000 prize (worth over £1,000,000 in today's money). He died 3 years later.

We saw a planetarium show while we were there about all the observers that have travelled to Mars. It wasn't really a planetarium show as it really didn't have the stars and such...it was just a movie on a cieling, so I was a bit dissappointed. I hope they actually do a start show some day, like they have at Roberson's back in Binghamton. I didn't even see one of those star projectors there, so it was a little ridiculous, but it was an interesting movie.