One of the joys of traveling is the night view. Like Busker Busker’s ‘Yeosu Night Sea’ and Kona’s ‘Our night is more beautiful than your day’, the night scenery with lights flickering excites travelers. The newly emerging mecca of night sky travel is Goheung, Jeollanam-do. A drone show and a sea fireworks festival will be held at Nokdong Port, where the night view of Sorok Bridge can be seen. Let’s take a trip to an unfamiliar planet in the black and blue universe while gazing at the starlight at Naro Space Center, Korea’s first space center, and the Space Astronomy Science Museum.
● Space science journey following the starlight
Goheung, located in the southwestern part of the Korean Peninsula, consists of the Goheung Peninsula and 230 islands. Naro Bridge, which connects the Goheung Peninsula and Naenarodo Island to Oenarodo Island, is a bridge to space. Every time I turn a winding corner, the picturesque island and seascape of the Dadohae Sea appears and disappears. This is the headquarters of the Heungyang naval force, which was very active with Admiral Yi Sun-sin during the Japanese invasions of Korea.
![Goheung night sky, I want to see it with you[전승훈 기자의 아트로드]](https://dimg.donga.com/wps/NEWS/IMAGE/2024/12/21/130690888.4.jpg "Goheung night sky, I want to see it with you[전승훈 기자의 아트로드]")
When the land and the island came to an end, Naro Space Center, the first space center in Korea and the 13th in the world, appeared. It is a historic site where Naro in 2013 and Nuri in 2022 were successfully launched. First, the Space Science Museum welcomes guests. Here, you can experience rocket launcher engines, artificial satellites, and zero gravity in space. Doctors from researchers provide explanations about space science to visitors.
The site of Naro Space Center is 5.5 million m². It is the size of 700 soccer fields. Hidden along the coastal cliffs are state-of-the-art facilities, including a launch pad system, launch vehicle tracking and control center, and launch vehicle assembly building. Except for the Space Science Museum, it is a secure facility where public access is normally restricted. However, once a month, if you use the ‘Goheung, Space Science Travel Train under the Starlight’ program in cooperation with the Jeonnam Tourism Foundation and KORAIL Tourism Development, you can tour the security areas such as the launch control building, launch pad system, and launch vehicle storage building. .
Visitors first received a briefing on Korea’s space exploration journey from senior researcher Song Byeong-cheol at the space center’s launch control building. This is the very place where countless scientists were anxious, sad, cheering, and applauding during the launch of Naro and Nuri, counting down, separating the first and second stage rockets and fairings, and tracking the entry of satellites into orbit.
The next place we visited was the Naro launch pad. A green umbilical tower stood tall next to the launch pad, and lightning rods painted red and white guarded it from all directions. Here, the launch vehicle is erected upright using a standing device, and then connected to the tower with numerous cables like an umbilical cord, and is injected with various high-pressure gases, fuel, and oxidizers. That’s why the launch vehicle is often nicknamed ‘tin can’ and the umbilical tower is nicknamed ‘gas station’.
A three-story underground launch building is hidden beneath the launch pad. It is a place with a total floor area of 8,900 m² (approximately 2,700 pyeong) and various facilities are provided in rooms tangled like a spider’s web. Senior Researcher Song introduced, “It is a space with such a complex system that researchers who first go there will get lost.”
It is said that the candidate sites for Naro Space Center, which was built in 2009 as the world’s 13th space center, were 11 regions, including Gyeongnam, Gyeongbuk, Jeonnam, and Jeju. According to Senior Researcher Song, numerous difficulties had to be encountered in the process of determining the rocket launch angle, ease of orbit tracking, and obtaining consent from residents. In the end, it was decided on Oenarodo, the remote island with the fewest people. It is said that in the beginning, roads were not properly maintained, so most construction materials and rocket equipment were transported by ship through the sea.
Goheung’s space science trip continues at the Space Astronomy Science Museum. It is an astronomical observatory equipped with Korea’s largest 800mm main telescope and six auxiliary telescopes. Through a telescope, you can clearly see not only the winter constellations, but also the rings of the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn. The 60-seat astronomical projection room shows astronomical images for about 30 minutes and explains constellations in a circular dome space with a diameter of 10 m. The atmosphere is similar to the dome theater at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, USA, where the two main characters danced and soared in the movie ‘La La Land’.
It’s good to look at the stars through an astronomical telescope, but we recommend taking pictures of the night sky directly using your phone’s astrophotography mode. When taking pictures of stars, you can get more realistic pictures by using an astronomical telescope and a dome building in the background.
Goheung Nokdong Port, where you can taste fresh seafood such as eel, abalone, and octopus, is also a famous night view spot. Every Saturday night, a performance using 1,500 drones is held on the arched bridge in the Nokdong Port Sea Garden with the night view of Sorok Bridge in the background. About 240,000 people came to see the drone show, which was held a total of 38 times from April to November this year. The Media Dome next to the Sea Garden has a dome theater that explores the undersea and space and a virtual reality (VR) experience center, and the media art on the exterior wall is also worth seeing.
● The taste of Goheung in winter: cockles, oysters, citron, coffee
“When you open a cockle, it gets teary-eyed and looks like it’s about to shed tears. “The taste of slightly boiled cockles on a cold winter day is truly amazing.”
On the way to Udo Village in Namyang-myeon, Goheung, the cultural and tourism guide described the winter delicacy, sea cockles, as having a taste that ‘brought tears to my eyes.’ It is a local sentiment that refers to the shiny black flesh of a clam that has been slightly boiled and retains its moisture.
Udo, an island 1.3km away from the mainland, was an island where the water drained twice a day and the sea route had to be open to access. However, in April of this year, ‘Udo Rainbow Bridge’, the longest interconnected footbridge in Korea, was built. When you walk on a bridge painted in rainbow colors, the reeds sway in the wind and the sunbeams break like stars on the blue sea. When the water goes down, walk along the road below the bridge. This is a path where you can meet various creatures such as gobies, crabs, and cockles in the mud.
Cockles are not the only winter delicacy in Goheung. A cup of warm, refreshing citron tea, which is good for preventing colds in the cold winter, comforts me. Citron, which grows only in places where the average annual temperature is above 13 degrees, is grown along the southern coast, including Goheung, Wando and Jindo in Jeollanam-do, Geoje and Tongyeong in Gyeongnam. Among them, Goheung is the hometown of yuzu, accounting for 60-70% of the nation’s yuzu production.
Among the citron farms in Goheung, there are many places where you can experience harvesting citrons and making citron syrup and citron tea. As I entered the greenhouse at Yuhan Tourist Farm in Duwon-myeon, the scent of citron, as fresh as the scent of lemon blossoms, enveloped my entire body. On each tree, round, ball-shaped bright yellow citrons with a diameter of 4 to 8 cm were ripening beautifully.
At the Eden Food Factory on one side of the farm, you can experience making citron syrup. This is the process of thinly slicing the citron with the skin, mixing it with sugar, and putting it in an empty bottle. Those who pay a small fee can take the bottle home, let it age for about a week, and then drink it as citron tea.
Goheung is also home to Korea’s first coffee growing house, ‘Santiago Coffee Farm’. ‘Crystal Mountain Arabica’ coffee trees brought from Cuba are growing inside the greenhouse. It is amazing to see snowflake-like white flowers with a jasmine scent blooming on coffee trees and green coffee cherry fruits ripening to red.
The representative coffee product of barista Kim Cheol-woong, who runs a coffee farm in Santiago, is ‘Yuwine Coffee.’ It is made by fermenting Goheung’s special products, citron juice and coffee cherry together. Coffee beans infused with the scent of citron are roasted and brewed using the Dutch coffee method, then fermented again to resemble wine. It is a unique coffee that cannot be tasted anywhere else in the world, with the first taste of a fermented aroma like yuzu makgeolli followed by a rich, savory coffee aroma. Here, you can also experience the ‘coffee drip bag making experience’. This is an experience where you put 10g of Santiago Farm coffee in each drip bag, seal it, and take it home.
● Places worth visiting=At the Goheung Buncheong Culture Museum, a special exhibition commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of painter Cheon Gyeong-ja (1924-2015) is being held until the 31st. This is a rare opportunity to see various works by painter Cheon Gyeong-ja, who is from Goheung. As you enter the exhibition hall, you will see paintings of women with flowers in their hair, including ‘Gilrye Sister’ wearing a white hat. Artist Cheon’s original name was Okja, but he used the name ‘Gyeongja (鏡子)’ since he studied abroad in Japan. As the name ‘Woman Looking in the Mirror’ suggests, she painted self-portraits as if looking in a mirror throughout her life. The artist’s breath can be vividly felt in the drawings created while traveling around the world, including Tahiti, Vietnam, India, and France.