Katharine has been leading a Jane’s Walk at the Central Experimental Farm for many years now. The walk is an hour in early May, and always starts at the Dominion Observatory Building. The buildings are no longer open to the public, and the telescope was removed in 1970 — but the cluster of three buildings are a nice reminder of how this was once in the outskirts of the old city.
A plaque on the west side wall notes the official Canadian prime meridian: 05H 02M 51.940S west of Greenwich. After missing a train in Ireland in 1876 due to confusion over a.m. and p.m. on the schedule, Sir Sandford Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock system. To allow for a local time, he proposed dividing the globe into time zones, with the 0° meridian of Greenwich, England, being the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
The main observatory building was completed in 1905, and its 15" refracting telescope was initially used for detailed astronomical timekeeping to support surveying. The smaller domed building to the SE of the main building is the Photo Equatorial Building (building #9), and had a camera for photographing stars. On the SW side, the South Azimuth Building (1912) contained a telescope and a meridian pier to act as a reference point for surveying work.
Dominion Observatory at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, by Eric Fletcher
I captured this photo sphere at the end of the 2016 Jane’s Walk on a lovely Saturday afternoon. The trees were just starting to bud, and ~20 people had enjoyed the hour-long guided walk.
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