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| Preface to the First Edition | View |
| Preface to the Second Edition | View |
| Journals of the Society | View |
| In the Beginning | View |
| Society Members | View |
| In Quest of an Observatory | View |
| Public Displays | View |
| The Blackwell Donation | View |
| The Site At Last | View |
| Building the Observatory | View |
| The New World of the Zeiss | View |
| People and Events | View |
| The Matauri Bay Solar Eclipse | View |
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People and Events
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While previous chapters have been taken up with what was happening to the organisation of astronomy in Auckland, perhaps the most interesting part remains to be told-what people did or tried to do in the pursuit of astronomical knowledge.
Dr Corban spoke for all active members recently when he said: I have had more kicks out of astronomy than anything else I have ever taken up, and at very little cost.
SPECTACLE VIEW
D C Fisher
While members of the Auckland Astronomical Society-of which I was then not a member-took off in 1936 to view the annual eclipse of the sun from the Pukekohe area, I observed it from Devonport with my own telescope made out of a spectacle lens. I was 17 at the time and had just come from Napier where I made the telescope-which had a 24 inch focus. With it I projected the image of the sun on a card, and it came out very well.
This historic instrument has been gone a long time. It had a wooden mounting. The eyepiece came out of an old theodolite. It was all right for projecting the sun, but hopeless for looking at anything because I had not then appreciated the need for correction.
And I remember that at the time of the eclipse the birds went quiet and also the ripple marks appeared on the ground, which you get in this type of eclipse. It is as if you are looking through water and see ripple marks on the bottom of the pond. They were quite noticeable, I remember that.
It was only when I went back to Napier for the Christmas holidays following, that I was told that there was an Auckland Astronomical Society to join and it was suggested to me that I get in touch with Mr McIntosh.
MEDICINE MAN
Dr C A Corban
Not long after I began (my) observations of the Partial solar eclipse on June 9, 1956, I was urgently summoned to attend a patient with a heart attack so severe that I gave the relatives the gravest prognosis. The patient held on, however, and during a prolonged stay at the home I was able to use a dark glass on a couple of occasions and add to my rough sketches. At the time the whimsical idea occurred to me that other "medicine men" in history could have been similarly situated in ministering to some important tribal personage and by the adroit use of a little magic get the credit for exorcising the demon from the face of the sun.... But no magic at my command could move off the sun a heavy rain cloud which covered it when I returned home.
TELESCOPE CLASS
K D Adams
Most of the observational work at this stage was by individuals and not by the Society. People would announce at meeting their more interesting observations but there was no society much that I can recall. Nevertheless there was a fair amount of astronomical activity going on in Auckland of a rather different nature. First of all there was Mr A P Gardiner with his telescope making. He had a big following. He was a man I had a great respect for.
He was very keen on making telescopes and a very keen telescope making teacher. Perhaps more than anybody I can think of. He was responsible for many telescopes being made-rather a noteworthy fact. He made his home workshop in Dominion Road available and had a lot of people there building telescopes and many of them are doubtless members of the Society now.
Then there was a group out at New Lynn, very keen in those days and we made considerable efforts to bring more people from both of these groups in the Auckland Society or, if not actually to get them to join immediately, at least to get greater co-operation.
Charles Michie
Halley's Comet was the most striking comet I have ever seen.
I was then about 20 years of age-that was in 1910-and living in the country I had every opportunity to get up early and observe it. It was then about halfway from its perihelion toward the earth, and I watched its progress each morning. When I first observed it , it had a very brilliant tail about 15 to 20 degrees long, and morning after morning it extended further and further until the best sight I had was about two days before it passed the earth's orbit.
On that occasion the head had just risen above the eastern horizon and the tail extended for about 150 degrees like a searchlight beam from the east to the north-western sky. The next morning it was very close to the earth. I could not see the head before daylight occurred, but the tail was extending right across the sky. Then we had an easterly gale and rain, and when I saw the comet again it was not nearly so striking. The head was much bigger in appearance but the tail was extending away from us, and assumed a rather oval appearance rather than a long searchlight beam.
John Orr
I became very interested in variable stars and binaries. I had a tent down at the back of the section where I kept all my maps and books and I would dash out to the 3 1/2 inch refractor and have a look and then record my observations. But things became too uncomfortable so I decided to build myself an observatory with a dome and get a 4 inch.
Problems still arose when I wanted to observe fainter stars, but a bigger one would have to be a Cassegrain type because I did not have the room in my observatory. I was advised to buy the biggest telescope that I could afford. I had read a bit about the Maksutov design and Cox, Hargraves and Thompson and they made this telescope for me. I got the mount made locally by our Curator of Instruments at that time, Bert Smith.
The Maksutov I found was eminently suitable for this sort of thing. It had a wide field and, combined with the 4 inch refractor on the side of the telescope, I had an even wider field. I found that I could locate the variables on Frank Bateson's charts without any trouble at all. I was experimenting with photography also and I took quite a lot of photographs, the moon and the planets and I also had an astrograph 10 inch focal length which I used on star fields. I could get down to about magnitude 12 on that.
I liked the Maksutov design; it is not temperamental like the ordinary Cassegrain. You could use it in all sorts of conditions, it's like a refractor in that respect, it will give you a reasonable view even under bad conditions.
H O Williams
Grant Christie and I took lunar observations during one Apollo mission. We had endless data sent to us, from the Smithsonian Institute, lunar maps, and a pile of stuff about six inches deep. There was a credit card which enabled us to ring up Smithsonian directly, free of cost, if anything did occur. On many occasions flashes and other transient events were noticed on the moon by various observers throughout the world. And this opportunity was taken of organising everyone to observe while the astronauts were close to, and circling the moon. If they happened to be over Aristachus and Auckland rang up to say there had been a brilliant flash on the western side of Aristachus they would immediately speak to the astronauts and say, have a look and see what you can see.
What it all came to I don't really know. We sent some results back, we rang through once or twice, we filled out forms and posted them away. Figures galore. We would use the photometer on the Zeiss on the dark side of the moon so that if any flash occurred, it was not a reflection of sunlight.
There was only one time when we were getting to an interesting stage, the readings started to rise and rise, and had risen by about a third but it happened to be a Tuesday night, and the Public night had first call. What was coming up I don't know, but it had gone by the time the public were through.
BOS AUSTRALIS
Not only an astronomical discovery but a literary one as well may have come the way of one leading member of the Society. Most Nursery Rhymes have been traced to a historical event but not so Hey Diddle Diddle, whose origin has been a literary mystery and which first appeared in print in 1765. This dated it after a period of fairly in tense penetration of the southern oceans by early explorers, soon to be joined by Captain James Cook, and the theory advanced by Dr Corban is that it resulted from observations of a new constellation.
This is how he rediscovered it after studying the suggestions of a face in the tail of Scorpio (in this new constellation, Antares is in the forelegs and the Pointers in the hind legs), and was puzzled by the position of one of the Scorpio stars.
Dr C A Corban
It was too close and too bright to be disassociated from the row of three stars of the profiled face. It could not be disposed of in any suitable way, until one night it somehow tied up with the pattern of an inverted truncated pyramid forming a cow's head with three quarter face profile. The offending star thus became a definite asset, because it not only formed an eye on the right, (though not as brilliant as its fellows on the left), but it also unmistakably gave a solid geometric effect of bovine character, so that I wondered how I could have missed it for so long. Mental tranquillity was now restored at this neat fittings, for to look at it more and more was to see it delineated so effectively as to bring the constellation to very life in a new way. Besides, why should not the cow, that second mother of mankind, find an honoured place among the variegated animal groupings? After all, why leave the bovine representation entirely to Taurus the Bull, diametrically opposite in the celestial compound?
Why not even give it a suitable name-Bos Australis, the Southern Cow, or even Bos Australis Augusta, to emphasise both its majesty of extent and movement, and to remind us that it is about the month of August that it becomes suitably placed for the average observer.
Now it happens that the moon as it passes along the ecliptic brushes past Scorpio, indeed occasionally occulting the main star , Antares. So to my next discovery in the fascinating chain. I used to note, with Scorpio in the West, how the waxing young moon first appeared below the arc of stars in Scorpio's head, climbed up past Antares, moving steadily away up in front of the cow's leg, shoulder, neck and head, taking about two and a half nights to scale the full height. As it rose, it would of course bear away to the right, but there could be no mistake that for a couple of nights or so in the month the moon would lie below the constellation, so that at this juncture the cow would be literally poised in the act of jumping over the moon!
SURPRISING SOURCE
K D Adams
I will always be grateful to one of our members who brought along some space stamps to one of our meetings. He gave me a few and said "Would you like a few more?" And I got quite interested, because you will recall in the early days of the first sputniks and so on there was not a great deal of technical information. You never saw a picture of Luna, but pretty early on I realised that postage stamps were fairly accurate and the Iron Curtain pictures were by no means artists' conceptions-they were quite factual. So I got interested in collecting postage stamps from a technical point of view.
I ended up with a very large and very costly collection of postage stamps from all over the place. I have upward of a thousand sets in three pretty massive albums of space stamps from heaven knows how many different countries. This is a sort of peripheral interest to astronomy but it is a surprising source of information.
ANNULAR ECLIPSE
C Michie, Leader of 1937 Canton Island Solar Eclipse Team
A very satisfactory annular eclipse in the Auckland-Pukekohe area offered the opportunity for our team to have a practice run. Most of the team with myself, forgathered at Pukekohe and spent about a week there putting up the instruments as they would be at Canton Island. The weather was splendid. The eclipse occurred about noon so that we had wonderful conditions. There was a tremendous crowd of people there. A few other people were there with other instruments as well, and Professor Burbidge and Mr McIntosh and others had their instruments set up in another position out of Auckland.
We got a multitude of photographs at various stages from before the onset of the annular stage, right through. Everything came out very well indeed, and it was quite striking to see the evidence of some of the lunar mountains showing on some of the photograph images.
PIONEER WORK
K D Adams
A man who did a great deal in his day was Ron McIntosh. Few would appreciate the magnitude of the pioneer work that he did in meteoric astronomy. You only have to look at his long list of papers on meteors. Astronomy-of course he was keen on Jupiter, too, and had a lot of papers there-but his fundamental papers are still referred to. Anything that appears in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has to be good and he is one of the few New Zealanders who ever produced a succession of top quality papers like that.
DETONATING METEOR
R A McIntosh
I was elected a member of the British Astronomical Society in 1927, and in that year I was able to secure a series of observations of the daylight comet 1927K, these were published in the Journal of the B.A.A. and monthly notices and mentioned in Nature and L'Astronomie.
Then in 1928 the Meteor Section of the New Zealand Astronomical Society was formed unofficially after correspondence between Messrs Bateson, Thompson and myself as sponsors. This led to the formation of other observing sections and was later given official recognition.
And then in 1928 I managed to get a valuable series of meteor observations which showed that the Orionid Radiant was in motion. Up until that time most people thought that the radiant was fixed.
That year I also investigated a bright detonating meteor. It was a midsummer night with a very clear sky, and speed cars were racing at Western Springs. Many people were out, when across the sky blazed very slowly this huge meteor.
It turned out it was first seen down in Dunedin, but it was still daylight there and they weren't too sure; it was seen very plainly in Canterbury, and in Wellington. Its track went over Hawke's Bay, low and steady, not dropping down, and finally burst into a huge number of lumps of fire over Northland. That was a most exciting thing. I got something like 400 reports and spent a year working on them.
COMETS FROM SUN?
Dr C A Corban
I have a theory that it will be a very quiet period for comets for the next four or five years. I have been 50 years doing sunspots since about 1941 consistently, and I think that comets, some of them anyway, come out of the sun. I wrote something about that theory in 1961, and I think it will come out in the fullness of time.
HOLDING HANDS
C Michie
When we came to watch the transit of Mercury in the mid-1930's from the reservoir hill above Kaitaia, the question arose how we would observe closely and record at the same time. So we arranged a rather ingenious device and a rather pleasant one too. The college principal had sent a number of girls who were interested, up to the hill to assist us. I think it was my happy idea that each of the observers would hold the hand of a girl, who in her other hand held a stopwatch.
And as soon as we noticed the dark edge of Mercury entering the sun's disc we would squeeze the girl's hand. Which we did.
We sent all the data to America via Carter Observatory and received a report back from America stating that our results were in very close agreement with those received internationally. So apparently squeezing the girls' hands produced results.
GRAZING OCCULTATION
H O Williams
A grazing occultation on May 13, 1968 was one of the most interesting things I have done. At the time Tom Richards was here. The path went through the Meadowbank golf course. We strung up a line of telescopes and worked out all the times, but it was a damp evening and quite a few of the outlying telescopes had trouble with dewing at the critical moment. Because I had hurt my leg quite badly I could only just hobble around.
The grazing was supposed to miss where I was but I sat up and watched what was going on with my own telescope.
What I actually saw is the above profile of the mountains of the moon, and it shows the path of the star, the disappearance, reappearance, 75 seconds in between, disappearance, reappearance, disappearance, reappearance. I had a steady telescope, no wind, and really high power on. You see the range of hills, cutting the path of the star through a crater-from one edge and to the other edge. This was one of the things I really enjoyed most of all.
PUPIL-PARENT COURSES
L A C Warner
When I thought of a course in astronomy at the Observatory, where there could be an atmosphere for it, I asked the views of many teachers and classes. And the response was overwhelming. Astronomy was not in the school syllabus then to any noticeable degree-just one phrase, the Solar System.
Mr Partridge, when I asked what he thought about a course for children and parents at the Observatory, gave every encouragement. The person who coined the name "Pupil-Parent Course" was Stan Walker, who produced it off the cuff.
Some people came on the scene who were so helpful with the course that I do not see how it could have got off the ground without them.
There was Stephen Hovell, for example. He was a boy who joined the astronomy club at Avondale College and was an example of how, if a school encourages it, then you get people who may take a life-long interest it. He did a remarkable thing. He did not have a Norton Star Atlas and I don't know if he knew of such things but he used to go out every fine night and make his own charts. He charted something like 2000 stars, including some that are normally seen only by people in the northern hemisphere. And he used to come along and help me at the courses.
Since he left there have been Phillip Ellis and June Sale. People are not supposed to be irreplaceable for what they do, but these three are irreplaceable in the way they did it.
Mr Warner has now retired from taking the pupil-parent courses and a worthy successor for him is being sought.
MR BEAUMONT
Mr L R H Beaumont was President of the Society from 1950-1951. But that is to say almost nothing about a man who worked tirelessly for the Society for many years and who preached astronomy ("preached" is an appropriate word because he appears in some minutes of the day as the Rev L R H Beaumont and he was filled with the glory of the heavens) to adult education and university extension classes for years. He served on the Society Council continuously from 1949 until is death in early 1966 and in that time he was a Council member (1949, 1952-55), President (1950-51), Vice President (1957), and Secretary (1956, 1958-65).
Many members owed their introduction to astronomy to him, even some whose professional approach today is far removed from the enthusiasm for viewing the sky which was the centre of his interest.
He was a gentle, kindly man (and some of his colleagues sometimes played tricks on him by excluding him from lectures that he wanted to give) but the fund of affection for him was enormous.
Most people remember him as "Beau-y" - the tireless worker and enthusiast.
"He probably did more than any other single person at the time in New Zealand to interest the public in astronomy..." - Arthur S. Partridge.
H O Williams
I got to know Mr Beaumont about 1940. He had been President of the Society and at the time I knew him he was Secretary. I got to know him because I had a 12 inch telescope, he used to take Adult Education classes at the W E A and he needed someone with a decent telescope round town with which to give his class practical lessons. We have had as many as 45 people at a time, so many they had to form up in a spiral around the telescope.
He wasn't a technical astronomer, he couldn't find anything in the sky. I had to find it for him and I got to know the sky quite well because of that. And he would go up and marvel at it in such flowery language that all the people would laugh. It was what I would call emotional astronomy but most people are interested in looking at the stars in this way - there are only a few scientific types. The general public liked him and he gave lectures all round the place.
After a while he bought himself a little Austin car and, after having difficulty getting his license, rolled the car. He was then so nervous that I got the job of driving him to St Stephens, out at Bombay, to Maraetai, or wherever it might be for his lectures. I would load his gear up, drive his car, work his projector, show his slides while he did the lecture, then pack everything back in the car and drive home.
When he was bringing people to see through my telescope he would tell them to ring me if the weather was doubtful. I would get rings even if there were hail and thunderstorms. People would even turn up in the rain with raincoats on. But he did a lot for astronomy. I think he carried this side of the Society for a long time.
S N Smith
One night Mr Beaumont organised a visit to Mr Harry Williams telescope. It was in August, Scorpio was in a good position rising in the east and about 45 degrees up in the sky and it was a beautiful night. Of course Scorpio was Beaumont's specialty. He could talk about it for hours. It was the only part of the sky worth watching, according to Beaumont, and we were taking turns to climb up the ladder to get to the eyepiece of the Newtonian reflector when someone broke the ladder and that finished up the viewing for the evening. It was my first visit with them and I really enjoyed it.
When the new Observatory was finally under way, Beaumont was very keen to have a nucleus of members who could speak to the public. He probably foresaw the developments of today and he organised to have a class of very keen young people. Ron Welch went along there and Graham Loftus. I suppose there were a dozen of us at least that went along and we would go through lessons on the sky. We all learned something from it, even those who thought they knew it all. Then we took turns at speaking to see how we would stand up to speaking in public.
Then Beaumont suddenly died. It was a very sad business. He really loved watching the stars. He had to go into hospital with some eye trouble and then it came out that he would be blind, and would never see his stars again. Within a fortnight of that he was dead. I honestly believe that the thought of never being able to see his beloved Scorpio again was the contributing factor. I think he felt that life would not be worth living without that.
MARS - ONE WHO MADE IT
R A McIntosh
The telescope evening organised by the Society on the summit of Mount Eden on September 10, 1956, resulted in what is probably the best publicity the Society has ever received. Originally decided upon in July, lists of telescopes and volunteer demonstrators were prepared and all were advised to hold themselves in readiness for T-Day, to be announced only when the weather conditions appeared favourable.
T-Day was scheduled to commence at 7.30 p.m. but the crowd got there before the telescopes. By 6.45 p.m. traffic officers had closed the mountain road to traffic, the parking area was covered with cars, and 1000 people were queueing alongside the camera obscura, under the impression that this was Auckland's new Observatory. Telescope owners, as they arrived, scouted around for clear spaces, set up their telescopes and opened for business. By 7.45 p.m. seven telescopes, large and small, were in action and two had failed to force their way through the crowds to the mountain top.
From all points of view, the evening was a great success. The public had the novel experience of spending a few hours under the stars on a mild, pleasant evening-and they found it enjoyable. Most of them saw something-but whether it was Mars, Saturn or the Moon depended on fate, because the queues were so long that no one could tell at what telescope they ended, or what the telescope was pointed at in any case. The traffic officers estimated that more than 5000 persons visited the mountain that night, and it was certainly the biggest traffic problem the borough had in years.
ONE WHO DIDN'T
L A C Warner
There was a terrific fiasco at the close approach of Mars, in 1956, when on a general invitation that went out through the newspapers, nearly all of Auckland went up to the top of Mt Eden.
At almost the last minute, someone rang me up and asked me if I could bring up my 6 inch reflector because there might be a hundred people there. I put the telescope in my car but when I was several blocks away from the entrance to the hill-down the Mt Eden Road-I found the whole road, the only access to the hill itself, jammed tight with people. You couldn't get the car on to the mountain at all. You could not even walk up. It was absolutely impossible. Hell was let loose at the top, I believe, where only about five or six telescopes were surrounded by the whole of Auckland it seemed, and no-one saw anything as far as I know.
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