Photo Friday: Keeping time in Greenwich, London, England

Greenwich in London is best known for being home to the Prime Meridian, or the absolute centre of time. Well, when I mean time, I really mean that if you've ever heard of Greenwich Meridian Time or GMT, this is where GMT +/- 0 is.

Greenwich is also home to some really nice grassy places that make for awesome picnics in bright, sunny weather.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"] Loving these hair chains for summer![/caption]



Before getting to the Meridian proper, there's a museum on the history of clocks and timekeeping.



Also some pretty nice views over Greenwich and London.



Did you know that the phrase "on the ball" comes from this time ball?

The time ball on Greenwich could be seen from the river Thames, and would be raised to halfway up at five minutes to the hour and all the way up at two minutes to the hour - and back in the day, this is how ships got accurate time! The earliest pendulum swing clocks didn't work out at sea due to the rocking motion of the boats.





After walking through the whole museum we found the Meridian Line, which is built into the floor and shows the longitude of various countries around the world!





[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="700"] I found Singapore![/caption]



There's also a functional dolphin-tail sundial that tells you the time by the shadow that's cast.

(I checked the time on the sundial against that on my phone. It was impressively accurate.)





I went to the Royal Observatory and planetarium.





Here is a fragment of the Gibeon meteorite which is probably the oldest thing on this planet - it's a crazy 4.5 billion years old!



Inside the planetarium, while waiting for the show to start we saw some pretty lights dance around the rim. It reminded me a little of the aurora.