Scan Magazine | Experience of the Month | Denmark
Photo: Martin Kurzendorf
Experience of the Month, Denmark
What Danes do in the dark There are some things that you can only see in the dark. Imagine a cold winter’s night, the air is crisp in your lungs. You are standing in the middle of a mass of rolling hills left over from the last Ice Age. You know you are surrounded by four giant domes, but you cannot quite make them out. Everything is pitch black around you, but then you look up and see the stars more clearly than you ever have before. The Milky Way is displayed above you while a guide explains what you are seeing and what else to look out for. By Louise Older Steffensen | Photos: Brorfelde Observatorium
“Those are the kinds of experiences that we’re good at here. At Brorfelde Observatory, the darkness is an attraction,” says Sarah Sohl, head of communications. Since 2016, the observatory has played host to school trips, workshops and meetings, team-building overnight stays and a large array of talks and star118 | Issue 123 | April 2019
gazing events, aiming to combine learning and fun at all ages through activities as varied as firing water rockets into the sky and investigating the night through Denmark’s largest telescope. As the only place in Denmark, the observatory complex and the surrounding 40 hectares of land have been protected in order to pre-
serve the area’s deep natural darkness from any light pollution. The result is a place like no other, where the trinity of the observatory, the dark and the unspoilt wilderness provides a wealth of experiences that you cannot find anywhere else.
A search in the dark Brorfelde Observatory was built as part of the University of Copenhagen’s observatory department back in the time of the race to space. As astronomical observations were made more and more difficult due to Copenhagen’s increasingly nightlit streets and buildings, the university’s astronomers began to look for a spot outside of the city where the night sky would remain as brilliant as it ever were.