Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory

I had the supreme privilege the other Saturday of having a personal tour of the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory near Johannesburg.


Hart RAO was built by NASA in 1961 with a 26m dish antenna to track space probes. Over time is has become a radio astronomy observatory conducting space geodesy as well as astronomical work.

Prof Ludwig Combrink showed us around.  What a mine of information!  And what a cool bit of astro bling to have in one's office.

We started in the control room.  SLR on the left behind us, VLBI on the right (or so I recall).

He then showed us his two atomic clocks.  Accurate to something greater than my mind could cope with (loses less than a second every 300 years?).  To be honest he could be showing me his beer fridges and I'd be just as impressed ;-)

Ludwig is an incredibly smart cookie.  He wrote the algorithms for lunar laser ranging and was first to spot an anomally in a recent satellite gravity mission.  Blows your brains.

He wrote all this software.

There are only a few observatories that measure to the moon.  By the time the 75cm diameter pulse has been flung out from their lasers it has a footprint 6.5km wide on the surface of the moon.  Still then, trying to aim that beam correctly is like trying to shoot a coin from 3km distant.  And then you don't only have to hit the moon (aiming for the reflectors left by the Apollo mission) but catch the return beam.

Dinner party fact Number 1 - the moon is racing away from us at 3.8cm per annum.  That's quite fast in the solar way of things.

This is the GPS station for Hart.

I queried why it was outside the perimeter fence.  "Stops the kids fiddling with it," was Ludwig's response.  Hart RAO has educational visits and there is little that mischievous fingers can interfere with on a 26m dome, but a small GPS antenna is just fun to play with isn't it?

Maritime Karlskrona

I have just had the privilege of spending nearly a week in the wonderful naval town of Karlskrona in Sweden.

In 1679 King Karl XI of Sweden declared that Karlskrona should become the home for the Swedish Fleet. Its first location, in Stockholm, was proving a disadvantage in their war against Denmark. The Danish Fleet, based in Copenhagen, unfroze before they did and the Swedish ships were unable to defend themselves whilst the Danish took a pop at western Sweden.

I was in a week long maritime-focused meeting based in the Naval Museum.

What a wonderful venue for a heap of nautically passionate people!

At lunchtimes/coffee breaks, if we had time, we were able to explore.


An old mine hunter.


Karlskrona is on one of many islands and the views were wonderful. Especially as we had sun for most of our trip.


I found a couple of lighthouses.


And even a messpunkt! (or rather a Mat Punkt - the Swedish equivalent).

I didn’t have much time to mooch around the museum so knew exactly which exhibit to focus on.

I made a bee-line for the navigation area.

Lots of lovely sextants, old charts and compasses.
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We enjoyed using the astrolabe to measure our latitude.

I was hopelessly in error (the computer retorted “your crew want to know what you are up to…”).

A naval officer then had a go – to show me how to do it properly – and he was equally off the mark.

I suspect that when I dropped the astrolabe first off I put it back together incorrectly. Doh.

Near the naval museum is a small workshop for boat making apprentices.  We were welcomed in and indulged our senses - both visual and aromatic – gazing at these beautiful boats and breathing in lungful’s of oak scent.

Ooh, a chart.

This guy was pretty devoted to his craft. He estimated that with working 4 days a week on this boat he’d finish it around the summer of 2017. Now that’s dedication.

One evening we visited the Officer’s Club.  It has an amazing library with oodles of historical documents.


It was all somewhat casually handled: I know in our archive we touch these precious documents gloved. In this library we were allowed pick up what we fancied. Although most of us, recognising the precious nature of these items, didn’t.

We also managed to fit in a visit to the submarine museum there.

This was the first submarine the Swedish Navy had which came into service in 1904. It could only dive for a few hours and there was no messing nor sleeping arrangements onboard. Cooking was done on the top deck whilst surfaced (obviously) and sailors slept where they could in the cold, single hulled vessel.

This submarine., HMS Neptun, was retired around a decade ago so a lot more modern.


A tincy tiny chart table.

On our last day it clouded over. No great shakes except it happened to be the day of the partial solar eclipse.

I put my shades on but I hardly needed to.

Samoa Tides and Levels

A colleague of mine has recently been surveying in Samoa and sent me a few holiday snaps.   He obviously had a good dig for this treasure.


Of particular interest is the tide monitoring station in Apia Harbour.


I'm not sure for how long it has been continuously monitoring but it is obviously of significant importance considering the vulnerability of this (like many) Pacific Islands.  Samoa was last devastated by a tsunami in 2009.  And if it's not a tsunami it's a cyclone, as 'neighbouring' Vanuatu has recently suffered.

I'm sure I could unearth more on this interesting island if I had the time but it'll have to wait until another day.

No-one Knows Where I Am And No-one Can Hear Me Scream

Continuing my theme of arm chair geo bagging a few more recent phots from surveying friends.

Firstly, one from Afghanistan.

One from the Washington DC area.

And this slightly mysterious one which I've been passed from someone recently.  However I had a geomatics fail and forgot to retain adequate metadata about it.  Doh.

My final offering is from Japan in the form of a cartoon about a lost and found survey marker.  The article about the lost marker stake travelling from Japan to the USA is here.  However the real piece de resistance is delivered by the manufacturer of the survey marker, Ripro Corporation, who have turned it into a traditional Manga graphic comic book.  In includes the haunting phrase when the little survey marker is all alone in the ocean and realises that "no-one knows where I am and no-one can hear me scream".  But you can read on without alarm; there is a happy ending awaiting Little Orca.

"Mum, It's Behind You" - An Afternoon of Discovery in Birmingham

Roger and I travelled to Birmingham today to visit our daughter, Caitlin.  It was a wet and blustery day and we headed to the city centre for a stroll to the canal.  As ever, my geo antenna were on full alert and as we walked through Victoria Square I knew there had to be something for me there.  And, yes, there was.  A lovely flush bracket benchmark on the side of the Council House.

"Ah," I mused to Caitlin.  "A Council Hall....reminds me of St George's Square in Glasgow where we found those standards measures on the side of the wall and across the square.  I wonder if there are any here?"

"Mum," she responded.  "I forgot to mention it.  They're behind you."  And lo and behold!

Aren't they just beautiful?

Feet, links, metres and poles.  Wonderous.

Not sure I've ever heard of a Dekametre.

After this we scurried to the library to enjoy the amazing architecture and the book rotunda.  On the way to the Shakespeare room we walked past the map section.

Well, not so much walked past.  More like stopped.

It was stuffed full of treasures.

Some beautiful books.

And a limited edition copy of Blaeu's 1662 atlas of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

Such treats; and makes me wonder if our local library has similar offerings.  I must go check.