Small Instrument - Big Task

A Historical Account of how a Repsold Universal Instrument came to serve at the Arctic End of the Struve Geodetic Arc

authored by
Bjørn Ragnvald Pettersen, Jürgen Müller
Abstract

Source material in Norwegian and German archives has been searched to track the construction history of a small Repsold Universal Instrument that served at the Arctic end of the Struve arc. Handwritten letters by professor Christo-pher Hansteen in Oslo and instrument maker A. &G. Rep-sold in Hamburg have been transcribed. Relevant excerpts are quoted throughout this paper in order to document the his-torical milestones leading to the first Norwegian contribution to international collaboration in geodesy. The triangulation of the Struve arc in north Norway was done during the sum-mer months of 1846 and 1847. A baseline in Alta, established with equipment from Pulkovo Observatory, was connected to the Struve arc by a series of expanding triangles, measured by the Repsold instrument during the summer of 1850. We briefly review the role of the instrument and the precision of the observations. Selected stations of the Struve arc, four of them in Norway, were included on the UNESCO world heri-tage list in 2005.

Organisation(s)
Institute of Geodesy
External Organisation(s)
Norwegian University of Life Sciences
Type
Article
Journal
zfv – Zeitschrift für Geodäsie, Geoinformation und Landmanagement
Volume
134
Pages
348-356
No. of pages
9
ISSN
1618-8950
Publication date
01.12.2009
Publication status
Published
Peer reviewed
Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Earth and Planetary Sciences(all)
Electronic version(s)
https://geodaesie.info/zfv/heftbeitrag/236 (Access: Unknown)
 

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