Anyway here's the pics of my birthday outing to Franeker:

Where? What? Well, it's a quaint old town that's pretty, but what makes it special over all the other quaint old towns we have here, is it has the world's oldest still-working orrery - that is Unesco world heritage. It's called the Royal Eise Eisinga Planetarium and is a pretty amazing visit.

To harbour the many visitors, the planetary has now gobbled up the 2 buildings beside it to teach about the galaxy and to display beautiful old telescopes and such.


View of Franeker, with town hall


The museum (Planetarium with black sign, and the two buildings to the left of it. The centre building has a pretty jugendstil restaurant.)


The beautiful former town hall of Franeker


The museum shows many old astronomical instruments and clocks. I tried to translate some of it but couldn't figure it out.


A beautiful antique astrolabe, a device to measure how high the stars are and thus position yourself;


Here it i, or the main part of it! In 1776 Eise Eisinga started to build the orrery, which took him 7 years to complete. On the side, as he also ran a successful wool business (he was well-love for his woad blue dyes) and held numerous prominent positions. The orrery is in the main room, the living room where you would receive visitors - but also dining room, kitchen, and bedroom. (and this clock ticks believe you me.

Eise bought the clock with a regular 25cm pendulum (which moves back and forth once per second) but he found that he would have to gut a hole in the ceiling of his already tiny alcove, so he shortened it so it goes back and forth 80 times per minute and adjusted the gears.

All the gears were hand made, mostly from oak wheels with every single one of the iron nails hammered in separately at the correct distance. For Venus and Earth, where there is a lot to do in the centre (and there is a little moon circling Earth as well) the gears are metal with the teeth filed out.

Eise did have help from his father and brother for the hammering and the painting, but he largely made it on his own and did the brain work for all the on his own.

The orrery is to scale, the size of the planets and distance between them are to scale. Uranus was discovered in 1781, the year Eise finished the orrery - had it been discovered earlier, the planetarium would have to double in size or only use half the scale (which would get very crowded in the centre).

To install it, Eise had to make a deepened ceiling - about 40 cm deep I estimate - where he somehow had to manoeuver these huge hoops. He also regularly maintained it and left detailed instructions for his sons on how to take care of the orrery. These are used to this day.


Here are: a sign that says "remember that God is everywhere", on the right the largest gear is the day indicator (goes round once per year), Saturn (goes round once every 20 -odd years or so) and Jupiter (goes round once every nearly 12 years)


With this time indicating - you'll hear it ticking, believe you me, but you don't see it moving at all. Just come back later and compare photos.


There! I was there on my birthday, April 4th!


In the beautiful salon, there is a treasury of orreries and assorted instruments, like this gorgeous tellurium. It sadly didn't appear to be running but it displays the positions of sun and moon, moon phase and such. The dominical letter (D) is correct for 2026 though.

very nice Bonny