Notice of Meeting

The January meeting of the Johannesburg Centre of the Astronomical Society will be held at the Sir Herbert Baker Library, on Wednesday 13th January 1999 at 8:00 p.m.

Topic:
Computers and Astronomy
by Tony Hilton.

 

A letter to the Editors

We received the following letter in reaction to the photograph printed on the cover of the Year End 1998 issue of CANOPUS.

Dear Raymond and/or Lori and/or Chris,

I was thrilled to see the picture of the old Observatory building on the outer cover of the Canopus issue for October, the building where I spent so many years of my life. I had never seen this picture; probably photographed about 1905. What a wonderful observing site it must have been in those days.

And I was wondering: would there be any possibility of getting a better , possibly larger print of this? The original will probably still be languishing somewhere. Could you provide any help??

And while we are about it - although it is really none of my business - I have never been able to understand why this building is nowadays called the " SIR Herbert Baker Library". In my days it was always simply called the "Baker building" . Because the fact of the matter is that it was NOT designed by Sir Herbert Baker, but by plain Mr Herbert Baker, a promising young architect and a protege of Cecil Rhodes. I think it was Gill who suggested that he be asked to do this work. Baker was knighted in 1926, and I rather doubt whether in later years he would have been particularly proud of this early example of his work

And lastly, I looked with interest at the list of URL's in "Web Between the Worlds". My own computer is a bit too basic and too slow for these things, but they may well be of interest to other members of our Centre. Can I have permission to copy the list for their benefit?

Yours sincerely,

Jan Hers

Dear Jan,
We really do not know the answer to your query regarding the "Baker Building". Maybe one of our historically inclined members could supply an appropriate response.
The photo was supplied by Peter van Laun via Brian Fraser and we have scanned it at a reasonably high resolution in both monochrome and in colour. If you would like to have a copy of the photo, please contact the editors.
Please feel free to pass on any URLs we publish to friends and colleagues - you may also find the list of "favourite sites"on our website to be fairly interesting.
By the way, regarding the "October" issue - please read the apology printed in the Editorial.

The Editors.