Turn Off The City Lights And Gaze At The Stars

With all the ambient light and the pollution of modern cities, delightful moments when you can lie and gaze at stars are rare. Régine Debatty from We Make Money Not Art spotted a lovely project that will delight the Londoners.

The Urban Stargazing installation by the French product designer Oscar Lhermitte “focuses on bringing back the stars in the city sky by recreating existing constellations and adding new ones, narrating old and contemporary myths about London”. Twelve constellations have been designed to tell a story about London and have been installed all around the city.

Lhermitte told Régine Debatty the story behind the Mosquito constellation:

“It has recently been discovered that the London underground houses its own peculiar species of mosquito. Apparently, they mutated from the bird-biting form that colonised the underground when it was built in the last century to a variety that nips rats, mice and maintenance workers. Underground mosquitoes are reluctant to mate with their outdoor cousins, indicating that they have become a separate species — a process that normally takes thousands of years rather than decades.”

Those who do not want to spoil the magic of this poetic installation should not read the following lines by Oscar Lhermitte:

“Each constellation is a triangulated struture made out of clear ø 0.6mm nylon line, ø 0.2mm polyethylene braid, ø 0.75mm fibre optic and a solar powered LED. During the day, the battery is being recharged by the solar panel and the circuit switches ON the LED when it is dark enough to observe stars. In order to have the constellation in the air, the team uses a telescopic catapult to fix the structure on top of trees.”

More pictures here!