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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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The Site At Last
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The December 1960 issue of the Society's journal carried an announcement by the Society president, then Mr K D Adams, stating:
After a long series of frustrating attempts to secure a good site, it is pleasing to be able to announce that the Observatory is now about to become an accomplished fact. The One Tree Hill Domain Board has kindly offered a suitable site in a splendid setting on the lower slopes of One Tree Hill, near the Manukau Road entrance to the Domain. No objections to the proposal have been received. Prolonged technical investigations have been made and there is no doubt that the site is satisfactory in every respect.
K D Adams
There were many of us in those days engaged in astronomy professionally who found it questionable just how worthwhile it was to waste too much time on some of the astronomical society activities, not just in Auckland but anywhere.
The number of people who were doing really worthwhile work were to be counted on the fingers of one hand. The majority of these did not require assistance, didn't ask for assistance and we were delighted to help them whenever they needed it. On the other hand there were other people that expected a great deal of assistance and would at the drop of a hat conduct all sorts of correspondence on all sorts of wayout things and waste a great deal of time. In the meantime, we ourselves were breaking our necks to get cracking on some real research.
Consequently I was not keen to get too involved when I came from Carter to Auckland, but I pretty soon changed my mind because in Auckland there was a unique situation because of this offer of a telescope that had been languishing for many years. This seemed to me to be a dreadful shame. This was something I felt pretty strongly about.
The lack of agreement where to put the telescope, which telescope to have and so on, was then the main reason why I got involved fairly deeply with the Auckland Astronomical Society. I had to try to resolve it.
As a result I became president fairly rapidly and I got involved in public controversy in a fairly big way, letters to the paper, addressing public meetings and so on. [There was] the search for sites and trying to make the general public aware of the offer that was going begging and aware of the whole problem. Trying to stimulate people into making offers of sites, because it seemed to me far more preferable to have somebody offer a site rather than be compelled to make it available. We wanted to be welcomed rather than just tolerated.
There was a lot of feeling about some of the sites. Mt Roskill was one that was offered and one that we looked at pretty closely. Another one which was not favoured - I think it was in a park along there (Outhwaite Park, Newmarket). The residents were very concerned about the proposal to build an Observatory; they were worried about cars parking in the streets and so on. They called a meeting and Lawrence Nathan and I went along to try to explain to the residents what we had in mind, that we were merely considering the site and that we were looking at all possible sites in the Metropolitan area. Mr Blackwell felt pretty strongly that the Observatory should go in metropolitan Auckland and not in the Waitakeres or in some area possibly more desirable from an observational point of view.
A fair amount of effort went into this - although some people today mightn't believe that. We did spend a considerable amount of time considering various sites around Auckland discussing the various sites with the respective authorities. I suppose I was mainly concerned with the technical nature of these things and Lawrence Nathan was mainly concerned with the local body politics and giving excellent advice and guidance concerning the approach that should be made.
At any rate we decided rightly or wrongly on the One Tree Hill domain site on the grounds that this - and I am still firmly convinced of this personally -was the best available site at the time. We realised then of course that it had serious shortcomings but at least we were welcome, it was readily available, it had many advantages and we could have wrangled over other possibly better sites for years and still not have an Observatory.
We then got on to this matter of which was the best buy in telescopes because it was questionable anyway whether we could take any other instrument other than the one offered to us. So we got in touch with all the major makers. We wanted their price for their best buy in 20 inch reflectors. That is what it boiled down to, and we left the specification pretty broad at that stage because we did not want to limit them.
It did pretty rapidly boil down to Tinsley and Zeiss as being the only two; and there were overwhelming reasons why Zeiss was the best buy because inflation had come along and everyone else's price was escalating but Zeiss was prepared to hold their price.
A S Partridge
They had nearly decided on the Zeiss but not quite because they did want the Newtonian and a Cassegrainian optical system and Zeiss was not prepared to combine both systems. They could have one or the other but they could not have both and at that particular time another design was brought forward - the Tinsley.
They called a meeting in my home in Mt Eden of all the people who were involved. It was rather an interesting meeting really because, when I look back on it, the number of people involved who weren't competent to decide on a suitable instrument was rather amusing.
The Tinsley offered a lot of additional features which the Zeiss didn't have but it was still felt by the hard core that the Zeiss would be the better instrument. So Zeiss was recontacted, to reassess this demand for a Newtonian Optical system linked with the Cassegrain and finally they agreed to submit what they called a transformation system. A system of seven lenses was going to affect this transformation. It was going to cost us about £750, and finally it was decided that this was the instrument that we would have.
It was then decided to place the responsibility of raising the necessary funds in the hands of a group of public spirited business men who would be designated the Trustees of the Auckland Observatory Fund. To this fund the Society handed over all of the funds it had collected to that date, about £1400, and together with Mrs Blackwell's offer made a nucleus of some £8,900. Since that time the fund had been augmented by about £5000 plus a further bequest from the Blackwell Estate of £2500 for the increased cost of the telescope. (Extract from the president's address by A S Partridge, 1963.)
[The Trust Board was proposed in 1955 and formally established on September 13th, 1956 by the Society. The Society handed over the sum of £3000 to the new Trust Board as the start towards raising the much greater sum necessary for the completion of the Observatory. The final decision on which telescope to purchase was not made until 1963 and the order placed with Zeiss on April 1st, 1964.]
A S Partridge
I remember vividly at a meeting where a number of councillors were starting to get very agitated indeed over the fact that apparently no progress was being made. It was suggested that we should ask for our contribution to be returned to us and that we would put up something of our own, considerably less than what the Trustees visaged. It would be ours. This was a school [of thought within the Society], which at that particular stage I supported, and for some considerable time there were a number who wanted to pursue it, because of the delays in getting sufficient funds to turn the first sod.
After I had been on the council for about 12 months Mr Adams decided not to stand again, and no-one else wanted it, so I became President, and that automatically put me on the Trust Board.
I then started to hammer very hard indeed, and it was finally decided at one of the Trust Board meetings to make a start. The trustees had insufficient money, but the Blackwell estate agreed to underwrite the deficit in the meantime.
In between times there was a lot of fun and games in the Society because they had produced a model of what the architect felt the Observatory should look like - where we had the dome up on stilts, underneath was a pool of water. It was rather like the Taj Mahal and then some people asked what was going to happen when the water started to evaporate. So it was kind of taken apart and put together again. I pretty well had the responsibility of agreeing to all of these modifications on behalf of the Society because no-one else was available.
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