Royal Observatory

Welcome to the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the 'Home of Time' and the location of the world-famous Prime Meridian. Perched atop a hill in Greenwich Park, this site offers not only spectacular views of the London skyline and the…

The Prime Meridian is the defining feature of the Royal Observatory, a physical line that marks the center of the world's time and geographic coordinate system. Since eighteen-eighty-four, this line has represented zero degrees…

On top of Flamsteed House, you will see a bright red ball on a vertical mast. This is the Time Ball, installed in eighteen-thirty-three to provide a visual time signal to the ships on the River Thames. …

Inside the museum, you will find the most important clocks in the history of navigation: the H-one, H-two, H-three, and H-four chronometers designed by John Harrison. In the eighteenth century, the 'problem of longitude' was the…

Climbing the spiral staircase in the Onion Dome building, you encounter the Great Equatorial Telescope, the largest of its kind in the United Kingdom. This massive twenty-eight-inch refractor telescope was installed in…

The Octagon Room, located in the heart of Flamsteed House, is one of the few surviving interiors designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Completed in sixteen-seventy-six, this room was specifically designed for the first Astronomer…

Before you leave the observatory, you must visit the Camera Obscura, housed in a small tower near the exit. Inside this dark room, a lens in the roof reflects a live image of the outside world onto a white table. …

As we conclude our tour of the Royal Observatory Greenwich, we leave behind a site that has fundamentally shaped our modern world. From the Prime Meridian courtyard, where we straddled the hemispheres, to the delicate ticking of…