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Johannesburg Centre,
Astronomical Society of Southern Africa
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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: 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, The Editors. |
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