National Space Centre – Leicester

We have a National Space Centre. It’s in Leicester. Given that I’ve always viewed any aspirations we may have about a space programme through the prism of an Eddie Izzard routine “We didn’t have enough money to put a man in a track suit up a ladder!” both these facts surprise me.

The other weekend I decided I wanted to go see a proper planetarium show. I decided against the one at the Think Tank in Birmingham because I didn’t really want to pay to go into the Think Tank again. A quick Google told me that the National Space Centre also had the Patrick Moore Planetarium so that was my decision. One of my friends came with me and we were there for about 6 hours. It was £13 to get in which was reasonable and by doing a gift Aid on it this gives return visits within a year. I’ll be going back again I think.

We took in a couple of planetarium shows. The first was the free one called “We Are Aliens” which was better than I expected being a CGI thing for the kids. For some reason it was a bit dark, kind of like the light loss you get with 3D but we weren’t wearing 3D glasses. It was impressive though being projected across the entire dome and there was some interesting stuff on exoplanets. There was a nice Solar System flythrough that I particularly liked.
We also went to a later proper planetarium night sky show which cost an extra £3. I could have done with a little less about the mythology relating to the constellations and more stuff to look at being pointed out. As it was I drifted off on my own a bit during the legends of Perseus and Andromeda and went did a bit of constellation spotting of my own, looking for other targets that I knew should be there that weren’t pointed out. They had pointed out Cassiopeia, Orion, Taurus, Andromeda, Perseus, Pegassus, the Plough. I also spotted M31 – the Andromeda Galaxy, the Hyades cluster, M45 – the Pleiades, the double cluster in Perseus, Jupiter and quite a few others.

There’s some good exhibition areas too. They’ve a Soyuz hanging over the main ticket area and a couple of rockets in the rocket tower. The Into Space area was one of the best, probably because it had stuff, a lot of which seemed to have been used by the most famous British Astronaut, Helen Sharman.

In the rocket tower they had a display that showed the “Space Race” on a timeline. One of the display objects that excited me was the set of Brooke Bond Tea Cards that I had as a kid. Driving home this evening I was listening to The Infinite Monkey Cage Podcast and Brian Cox was talking about how he’d been inspired by these as a boy too.

Other areas such as Exploring the Universe had to rely on models and information boards. These were pitched at a good level though, understandable to children and those with very little understanding of the subject, but at the same time giving adults and those with greater knowledge something to think about.
There was also a section called Tranquility Base where there were interactive things to play with and some sort of 3D simulator ride that we actually ran out of time to have a go on. Next time.
All in all, a great day out. Just one word of warning. Even though the car park is dedicated to the site, it’s still pay and display. I only realised as we were heading back to the car. I guess I might have been a bit too excitable when we arrived. Luckily I got away with it.

In-flight Planetarium

On the flight out to Dubai I was amused when they dimmed the cabin lights and little star lights came on in the ceiling. Don’t think they were actually arranged to match any actual constellations but pretty cool all the same.