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Originally Posted by Cantankerous
i love the ceiling in there
i kind of want a tattoo of the pisces thing from the ceiling
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trivia about the ceiling in there.
The painting of the constellations was painted backwards. It's believed that the guys painting it looked at the reference in their hands and just painted the mirror image above them, but no one knows for sure.
When the ceiling was restored recently because of years of damage due to cigarette smoke and car and train exhaust they were debating "correcting" the ceiling and decided against it and to keep it as it was originally painted.
http://www.grandcentralterminal.com/...alkingtour.cfm
oops - correction:
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The most notable feature of the Main Concourse is the great astronomical mural, from a design by the French painter Paul Helleu, painted in gold leaf on cerulean blue oil. Arching over the 80,000 square-foot Main Concourse, this extraordinary painting portrays the Mediterranean sky with October-to-March zodiac and 2,500 stars. The 60 largest stars mark the constellations and are illuminated with fiber optics, but used to be lit with 40 watt light bulbs that workers changed regularly by climbing above the ceiling and pulling the light bulbs out from above. Soon after the Terminal opened, it was noted that the section of the zodiac depicted by the mural was backwards. For several decades lively controversy raged over why this was so. Some of the explanations offered were that it just looked better, or it didn’t fit into the ceiling any other way. The actual reason is that Paul Helleu took his inspiration from a medieval manuscript, published in an era when painters and cartographers depicted the heavens as they would have been seen from outside the celestial sphere.
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