Staring Up: The Grand Central Ceiling’s Starry Tale

The NYT Upshot’s 10-Minute Challenge invites readers to spend 10 uninterrupted minutes looking at Grand Central Terminal’s star-filled ceiling, a celestial mural of 2,500 stars and zodiac signs inspired by 17th‑century star atlases and designed in the early 1900s by Paul Helleu with input from James Hewlett and Harold Jacoby. The piece recounts the ceiling’s history—from the 1913 opening and a later misorientation when the projection differed from overhead viewing, to the asbestos-replaced 1940s ceiling and 1990s cleaning—while blending art and science and inviting reflection on why we look up. It also notes a forthcoming golden-hour view this weekend and explains the photograph stitching used to produce a high-resolution panorama.