The Eise Eisinga Planetarium is the world’s oldest working planetarium. The namesake owner was a tradesman with a serious sideline in cosmic mathematics and astrology, who clearly could have been a ‘somebody’ in the astronomical world. Beginning in 1774, he built the planetarium himself to show how the heavens actually worked. It’s startling to contemplate how Eisinga could have devised a mechanical timing system built to a viewable working scale that could encompass and illustrate so many different variables of time and motion.
