The Long Night of the Museums 2015
Members of the IET Germany Local Network (LN) met up on Saturday 17th October to visit the "Lange Nacht der Museen" (LNDM), an annual event where Munich's museums stay open until 2 O’Clock the next morning. All Museums can be visited for just EUR 15 (about GBP10). Ten participants from all manner of different areas, from aerospace to automotive, braved the autumn chill to meet up at "Café an der Uni". Even buying the tickets was steeped in science and engineering: The sales tent at the city´s Odeonsplatz was part of an open-air exhibition organised by automotive manufacturer MAN, featuring antique buses and trucks. The ticket itself showed a portrait of the optical physicist, Josef von Fraunhofer.
With the group free to choose to visit the different institutions and exhibitions themselves, people dispersed into the various parts of the city.
One of the first stops was the Max-Planck-Institute, were where visitors were shown round a gallery of metre-wide photos, depicting images from the fields of astrophysics to semiconductor microscopy. Many of images were on sale via silent auction. The evening also took in the Deutsches Museum, one of the biggest technical museums in Europe on the city´s "museum island".
The events visited weren´t purely technical, though. Just across the road from the Café was the memorial to the "White Rose Movement", a group of students who protested against the Nazi movement in the 1940. They were arrested and executed. Some LN members stopped by an American photography exhibition at the US Embassy's Amerikahaus.
"It was good fun," commented Darren, an electrical engineer originally from the UK, now based in Munich. He and his partner, Laura, had looked in on the LNDM the previous year and wanted to pay a repeat visit this year. The IET's Germany Local Network intends
to do likewise in 2016.
Andy Sinharay / Alistair Gill
Stuttgart too!
Please note: Stuttgart also has a "lange Nacht der Museen" once a year. This year it takes place on April 2nd. from 7PM to 2AM. Please see https://www.lange-nacht.de/ for details (German language website).
If any members are interested in making up an informal group to visit the museums in Stuttgart then please contact me. This year I won't be able to participate myself, but I will pass on contact details or help using the IET community website facilities, if needed.
Howard Gray (hdgray@theiet.org)