Eise Eisinga Planetarium

Between 1774 and 1781 Eise Eisinga, a wool comber and self-taught astronomer in the Frisian town of Franeker, built a working model of the solar system into the ceiling of his own living room. It still runs today, which makes it the oldest working planetarium in the world, and in 2023 it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Few scientific monuments are so domestic: the room below remains an ordinary 18th-century canal-house parlour while the heavens turn overhead.

On the painted ceiling the Sun sits at the centre, with Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn moving around it in real time on slots cut into the boards. The Earth is a small golden ball on a wire; the Moon's phases, the date and other astronomical data are shown on separate dials. The model is built at a scale of one millimetre to a million kilometres, and all its gears sit in the loft above, driven by a pendulum clock with nine weights. Around 10,000 handmade nails went into the gearing. Once every four years the mechanism is adjusted by hand for the leap day, and the board carrying the year numbers has to be replaced every 22 years.

The house became a public monument after King William I of the Netherlands was so impressed by it that he bought it for the state, hence the title Royal Eise Eisinga Planetarium. The museum around it includes Eisinga's former wool-combing workshop, a small cinema and a collection of historical instruments, among them Georgian telescopes, 18th-century octants and a tellurium showing the movements of the Sun, Earth and Moon.

The planetarium stands in the historic centre of Franeker, a small town in the Frisian countryside.

Getting there

Franeker is on the railway between Leeuwarden and Harlingen: trains from Leeuwarden take about 15 minutes, and from Harlingen, about 8 km away, around 7 minutes. From Franeker station the planetarium is roughly a 15-minute walk. The nearest airport is Groningen Airport Eelde (GRQ), about 70 km away.