Welcome to the homepage of the Centre for Astronomical Heritage, a non-profit company registered in South Africa (NPC 2016/295672/08) working to record, preserve, and disseminate information about, South Africa’s tangible and intangible astronomical heritage.
2025 Annual Report
Throughout the year, efforts to digitise South African astronomical heritage materials have continued, with particular emphasis on expanding the coverage of records pertaining to the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope. Additionally, the graphical collection of the late Professor Brian Warner has been digitised, and cataloguing of this material is currently in progress. Development of archival software for the management and display of the Centre’s digital repository is ongoing. Upon completion, this software will be made freely available to other custodians of digital archives.
Following the IAU General Assembly 2024 in Cape Town, an agreement was made with Dr Z.-H. Tang of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, to assist with the digitisation of the surviving photographic plate collection of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO). This collection comprises approximately 4,600 direct images and 13,000 spectroscopic plates. The direct image set—including prime-focus photographs acquired using the 74-inch telescope during its period at Radcliffe—had previously been catalogued by the Centre. The comet plate collection has been rehoused in archival-grade storage materials.
Alerts
- Read The Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope: History and heritage, by Dr Ian Glass, for free. This book gives a vivid account of the Observatory from its foundation in 1820 to the present day — 2024 Jan 31
- A reimagined version of the Heritage Full Moons is now available as a free 2024 Moon Calendar — 2024 Jan 02
- An overview of astronomical research and thinking over the last 6,000 years, with a 2024 perspective — 2023 Dec 20
- Updates to the projects currently underway. These include ongoing digitisation work at the SAAO Archive, cataloguing of administrative material of Boyden Observatory, and the development of ADAMS (Astronomical Data Archival Management System) software — 2023 Nov 13
