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)
-
Details in the research portal "Research@Leibniz University"