I’ve been writing off and on over the past year about the Griffith Observatory project, which has encompassed a complete renovation of the building as well as the addition of new exhibits. My part of the project has been to write the content for all the exhibits. Griffith Observatory opens to the public again this Friday, November 3rd.
We attended the opening Galactic Gala for the observatory last Sunday night, and it was a very memorable event. Mostly I wanted to attend to see the rest of the team I worked with all this time, but also to celebrate the re-opening of a singular institution—there is nothing like Griffith Observatory anywhere in the world. As director Ed Krupp has mentioned many times, it’s the only public observatory in the world that has had more people look through its telescope than any other telescope in the world. That alone is worth celebrating, because it means that a LOT of people have seen a little bit of the cosmos through the Observatory’s Zeiss.
The official ribbon-cutting is Thursday, and that will feature a number of public speakers. For the Galactic Gala, we heard a series of short introductory speeches, followed by the projection of the star Epsilon Cygni (72 light-years away) into the “O” of Observatory on the front of the Art Deco Griffith Observatory. The light we saw that night had left the star 72 years ago, when Griffith first opened its doors.