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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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Public Displays
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At about this stage the Society put on a display in the Blue Room at Farmers Trading Company over the Christmas period. It was probably the most comprehensive astronomical display ever mounted in New Zealand, with a lot of good equipment not only from Society members but from private sources and the university.
There were a lot of good murals too, a couple of them remain on display in the Observatory and Arthur Partridge, who was the moving spirit in the exhibition, recalls helping Peter Read to prepare some of these. "Peter did the hand work and I used the gun", he said.
Mr John Orr remembers helping to make screens for the display in an old shed at Western Springs with a team of Society members which was headed by Mr Stevenson.
Thousands saw the display, although because it was held at Christmas time, many of those who attended were from outside Auckland. While its cash contribution to the Observatory funds was not great, it did much to bring astronomy and the Society into the public eye.
S N Smith
After a number of years of working on my own, especially on variable stars, I noticed an advertisement for the exhibition in the Farmers, organised by this Society in Auckland that really specialised in this sort of thing. Up to then I had been a lone wolf and hadn't realised that there were fellow spirits around. I jumped straight into an active part, although I was on shift work and when I struck the wrong shift I couldn't do much. I used to take my binoculars to work with me on shift at Hellabys. I nearly caused a minor strike, as a matter of fact. One of the workers going home about nine o'clock saw me standing with the binoculars looking in his direction and he came up and said that he didn't want the supervisor watching him with binoculars.
E J N Greager
We thought of ways of getting money. About that time the Auckland Public Relations Office started the idea of having a birthday carnival at Western Springs. Someone suggested that we put our 12 inch telescope over there and invite people to look through it at about a bob a time. In the first year it was really successful indeed, not that we raked in a lot of money but the whole idea was to get the public to see what astronomy was all about. We had quite an exhibition including telescopes and had Walter Jackson making mirrors.
I took an old metal mirror something like 150 years old, and to an orrery supplied by Lionel Warner, we fitted an electric motor. We had it turning and it attracted a lot of people. And then, of course, at night we had the telescope going. As luck would have it out of the 14 nights about 10 were good and we had the moon and Jupiter to look at.
We did that at the Carnival for about three or four years. Some time in the 1950's we were offered a small planetarium with a canvas dome and set that up over there too, with Mr Beaumont putting a lecture on tape.
I suppose we made only about £60 in the whole three or four years we were in the Birthday Carnival, but at the time it put forward the idea that Auckland wanted an Observatory and it made people look at the sky.
Membership of the Society from that time onward took a jump. From about 60 members in 1947-48 it moved up to about 100. I remember that because I was secretary at the time (1953-55) and then up to 120 or 130. About two years later we got up to over 220 members which I suppose would give us a permanent basic membership of somewhere about 150.
John Orr
I joined the Society through the stall it was running at the Birthday Carnival at Western Springs. Percy Gardiner, who was running a school at his home for making mirrors, was at the stall and I asked him how to join the Society. I thought it would be hard and I would have to have a qualification, but they seemed only too pleased to get people. Before that I had only rigged up refractors on a post in the back yard.
The following year we had a bigger display at Western Springs; Bert Smith with his 12 inch reflector also, and Percy Gardiner again showing how to make mirrors. The year following there was a big display with a geodesic dome, and all up the stairs were charts of planets and stars. Mr McIntosh designed it all and it was a really good show and a credit to him.
I became a member of the Council in 1958, and in 1960 took over as editor for the Society. We then had a newsletter and magazine as well. The newsletter would only have run to about two sheets and the cost of the journal we would try to offset by getting advertisements. Mr Beaumont, working in the city for the Government Tourist Department, would get around and obtain advertisements from people like Meltzer Bros., Whitcombe & Tombs and Technical Books. I could produce the journal then, taking those things into account for £27 per issue. But the cost kept going up and finally reached £90 and then we had to stop.
Council meetings in those days were held at the residences of different members in turn, and usually they went on to about two o'clock in the morning. The main business was about getting a site for the Observatory and we would review the different sort of sites which we thought possible. We had great hopes of Mt Hobson because Mr Luxford, who was Mayor then, supported us but the residents took up a petition and I suppose the City Council had no option but to refuse us. But it was a wonderful site and Dr Corban fought for quite a while for us, pegging away at it trying not to take a refusal.
We were offered a site in St Andrews Road. It was a beautiful site, high, flat, but when we all went up there, there must have been about twenty of us, and had a look round, the people adjacent to it got word of it. They were indignant, had public meetings and the whole thing was squashed. We were not allowed there.
E J N Greager
A number of us came to think we had no chance of getting up on any of the cones. Eventually we decided that almost anywhere would do. We tried all sorts of places, but for one reason or another they were nearly all turned down.
One we were definitely offered was Mt Roskill, but there was a huge reservoir on the top there and fluctuations in the height of the water in the reservoir altered the weight that was on the mountain. It was found that there was so much movement that a scientific Observatory would be quite impossible.
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