Eise Eisinga was a wool comber in the Frisian town of Franeker, not a professional astronomer, and in the 1770s he built the solar system on his living-room ceiling. The story goes that in 1774 a local pastor predicted that the planets would align and bring disaster, and the town panicked. Eisinga, who knew some mathematics, wanted to show the real movements, and over the next seven years he built a scale model of the planets, with a clockwork mechanism hidden in the attic that still moves them today. It is generally described as the oldest working planetarium in the world, and it was listed by UNESCO in 2023.
The house is a small canal-side building in Franeker, a quiet town in the north of the Netherlands. Franeker once had a university, founded in the sixteenth century and closed by Napoleon in the early nineteenth, and the town has a handsome town hall, a canal and a general air of having seen busier days. Friesland, with its own language, flag and a very strong sense of identity, is a flat country of pastures, black-and-white cows, windmills, and sky that fills most of the view.
On a bike, Friesland is all about wind and open roads. The routes along dikes are smooth, flat and fast, with the wind coming off the Wadden Sea, and it can push a bike around, so expect to lean into it. Speed limits are strictly enforced, and cameras are frequent, so keep to the posted limits. The famous Afsluitdijk, the thirty-two-kilometre dike that closes off the old Zuiderzee, is about thirty kilometres from here, and the harbour town of Harlingen is much closer. Cyclists are everywhere, and they have priority in many places.
Franeker is a town of around thirteen thousand, so you will find fuel, bakeries and cafes without difficulty. Try Frisian sugar bread, sweet and sticky, with coffee, and if you are here in winter, remember that this is the country of the Elfstedentocht, the legendary skating race that depends on very cold winters. Booking ahead is advisable for the planetarium, because it takes small groups, and it is closed on some days, particularly Mondays.