Photos

The Atomium is a monument built for Expo '58, the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. It is 102-metres (335 ft) tall, with nine steel spheres connected so that the whole forms the shape of a unit cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times. Here you can see five of these nine spheres.

Each sphere is 18 metres in diameter. Three spheres are currently (2008) closed to visitors, others are easily reachable with escalator and with a lift.

Please read the note I found in Wikipedia about the image copyrights of the Atomium:

The Belgian collecting society, SABAM, via the United States Artists Rights Society (ARS), has claimed worldwide intellectual property rights on all reproductions of the Atomium image. For example SABAM issued a demand that a United States website remove all images of the Atomium from its pages. The website responded by replacing all such images with a warning not to take photographs of the Atomium, and that Asbl Atomium will sue you if you show them to anyone. Sabam confirmed that permission is required.

Ralf Ziegermann remarked on the complicated copyright instructions on Atomium's website specific to "private pictures". The organisers of Belgian heritage, Anno Expo (www.expo58.eu, planning the 50th anniversary celebrations of Expo '58), in the city of Mechelen announced a "cultural guerrilla strike" by asking people to send in their old photographs of the Atomium and requested 100 photoshoppers to paint over the balls. SABAM responded that they would make an exception for 2008 and that people could publish private photographs for one year only on condition they were for non-commercial purposes.

Anno Expo later announced they had censored part of their own report due to "complications" and referred to a meeting they had with SABAM. Mechelen's Mayor, Bart Somers, called the Atomium copyright rules absurd.

On February 23, 2009 Axel Addington, Web Content Manager for Atomium, e-mailed a clarification to the Glass Steel and Stone web site, which some years earlier redacted its photographs of the Atomium after being threatened. He stated, "The royalties are perceived by the descendants of Andre Waterkeyn, the engineer who conceived Atomium in 1955, and not by the A.S.B.L Atomium. So, you've probably been sued by the SABAM (Belgian Copyright Company) because of the Waterkeyn Family."

I agree with the Mayor of Mechelen(Belgium) in this: the rules are absurd and outrageuos.