The European Southern Observatory builds a station on Zeekoegat

1958–1961 · local · Prince Albert

The French team took Zeekoegat while the German-led team worked the Nuweveld from Klawervlei. Construction started in 1958; the cylindrical domed building housed a 40 cm objective-prism refractor, the Grand Prism Objectif, an exact copy of the Marseilles instrument, and it was fully operational by the middle of 1961, measuring radial velocities. The Nuweveld sites were closed and Zeekoegat became a working observatory rather than a test site. Tests of the new Siedentopf turbulent-cell technique were run here between July and September 1963, with good results. The observers, working at the far end of nowhere, took to counting the DONKEYS visible at each station as a measure of its remoteness, until an edict came from Europe telling them to keep donkeys out of formal reports.

Ground it happened on

• Zeekoegate

Sources

• Rose Willis & Doreen Atkinson, "Zeekoegat: Explorations in the Koup Karoo" (2022) 38pp cameo

Told in

• subject The French Observatory