Baker’s Planetarium Dream Comes True

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — After a lifetime selling cakes and pastries in a modest district of Copenhagen, 83-year-old Helge Pedersen’s dream has come true. He and his wife have built a planetarium.

The baker from working-class west Copenhagen and his wife, Bodil, heiress to a fortune from Denmark’s leading biotechnology and pharmaceuticals company, managed to raise $14 million for the project.

Both ardent amateur astronomers, they spent their days baking and their nights gazing at the stars.

Once retired, they pooled their life savings--$7 million--and borrowed a like amount to pay for the cylindrical building, which rises 125 feet on the shores of a lake a stone’s throw from the center of the Danish capital.

The planetarium, filled with high-precision instruments, is named after the 16th-Century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who was famous for his precise measurements of the stars.

A specially made, computer-controlled projector will display 9,000 stars on a 75-foot-diameter domed screen to audiences of up to 270 people.

The computer can also reconstruct the night sky as it was 2,000 years ago--or in Brahe’s time--giving audiences a front-row view of the universe.

“True to the Brahe tradition, our aim is to broadcast knowledge on the latest developments in astronomy,” chief astronomer Hans Joern Fogh Olsen said.

“We plan to show 100 films on astronomy and space exploration and our new revolutionary star projector, built for us in West Germany, is the jewel in the planetarium’s crown,” he added.

The Copenhagen planetarium is the largest in Western Europe. The world’s biggest, in Moscow, has a dome six feet greater in diameter.

About 1,000 planetariums have been established worldwide since the first was built in Chicago in 1930 and the Copenhagen one expects to profit from a current wave of public interest in astronomy by drawing more than 400,000 visitors annually.

Brahe is currently arousing interest--not among astronomers but archeologists. Experts have begun excavations at the ruins of his observatory on the islet of Ven, now Swedish territory.

The archeologists hope to discover how Brahe built what was the world’s first modern observatory. It was from there that he proved that the stars were not fixed, as contemporary scientific and religious teaching had maintained.