Toomas Karmo: DDO Conservation: Remarks to Mayor and Council at 2017-11-06 Committee-of-the-Whole

David Dunlap Observatory Administration Building, as photographed with my iPhone3 on one or two of my visits this late summer or this autumn. Clockwise, from top right: west facade, showing discolouration on two rooftop domes; north (or, less likely, south?) facade, again showing discolouration of a rooftop dome; a ground-floor windowsill on the east facade, showing torn screen, deteriorating paint, and possibly rotting wood.

Other David Dunlap Observatory buildings, as photographed with my iPhone3 on one or two of my visits this late summer or this autumn. Clockwise, from top right: the 1930s pump house, as temporarily moved from the now-destroyed 32 hectares to the DDO parking lot (on at least one of my visits, I found the pump house incorrectly secured, with a window opening now uncovered, and therefore now inviting intrusion from conceivable delinquent community elements); the Radio Shack; the Great Dome catwalk, showing discolouration from corrosion.  - Not shown in this pair of photos is another heritage building, the circa-1865 "Elms Lea" dichromatic-brick farmhouse, or "Director's Residence" (a kind of Victorian agrarian mansion, with two fireplaces, and in my own DDO days with a wine cellar). On my visits, I found my approach to Elms Lea legally barred by a sign, not necessarily any longer accurate, identifying the building as a private residence. A question for authorities monitoring Elms Lea's ongoing compliance with the Ontario Heritage Act is the condition of its formerly 1930s-elegant interior. An upstairs master bathroom, with marlenedietrichesque, or I suppose joancrawfordesque, 1930s black-and-white floor tiling, is rumoured (I do not know how accurately) to have been subjected to an anachronistic alteration in recent years. I speculate that if there has been such an alteration on that particular element of décor, then other alterations, in that same spirit, and even in conceivable contravention of the Act, may also have occurred. I do believe on what I take to be good authority that in or a little after the 2008 DDO sale to Corsica Development Inc., Elms Lea became the residence of some relation or friend or acquaintance of Corsica. - Corsica legal team, notably advocate Mr David Bronskill: please comment if you are able to add constructive remarks.

Revision history:

All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné,  a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 5 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 2 hours.

• 20171107T0441Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo added two graphics. - Kmo reserved the right to make further tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, ... . 
• 20171107T0256Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo uploaded the text of his Committee-of-the-Whole communication.

[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]

[Some of my readers, especially conceivable readers in municipal or provincial or Canadian-federal decision-making circles, may find it helpful to have an upload of my letter to the Mayor and Council of the Town of Richmond Hill, as prepared for the 2017-11-06 Committee of the Whole. The letter is usefully read along with my many other earlier postings, on this same server, regarding the David Dunlap Observatory and Park heritage-conservation file.]  

Submission by Toomas Karmo

for Town of Richmond Hill

Committee of the Whole

Meeting of 2017-11-06; 

Comments on SREIS.17.021

(Staff Report on DDO Maintenance),

for Inclusion in the Public Record

1. Preamble

The staff report SREIS.17.021 is available from the http://www.richmondhill.ca meetings calendar, as a document for the Town of Richmond Hill Committee of the Whole meeting of 2017-11-06.

SREIS.17.021 gives useful guidance on what might be considered half of the current DDO heritage-conservation problem, namely the infrastructure framework of the observatory. The other half, concerning the three telescopes themselves (a 1.88 m reflector in the Great Dome, a 0.6 m reflector in the central dome of the Administration Building, and a 0.4 m reflector in the south dome of the Administration Building) falls outside the scope of SREIS.17.021. This second half will have to be the subject of ongoing scrutiny by the heritage-engaged and astrophysics-engaged taxpaying publics.

Such taxpayers will be above all seeking to monitor ongoing maintenance of the 1.88 m reflector. Is, for example, the necessary periodic lubrication continuing, at a minimum of once in six months, on a properly formal schedule which such taxpayers can in due course monitor - in the final resort  making, should other legal avenues fail for them, a request for current DDO work orders, or similar current papers, under Freedom of Information legislation?

Such taxpayers will also be paying due regard to the status of the three Administration Building domes - noting not only the deterioration of their exterior paintwork since 2008, but also raising questions regarding their contents. Such taxpayers will take an interest not only in the south and centre domes, with their respective telescopes (one functional, another possibly needing repairs to its declination motor and its RA readout) but in the north, currently empty, dome. Taxpayers will note that this dome was wired in the 2009-through-2016 era, very likely by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, for current-day astronomy. The wiring comprised good quality, current-day, conduits for power, for coaxial cable (as appropriate for a video feed), and for T100-or-similar Ethernet. They will then ask: What can now be done to bring the northern dome into astronomical service, so that the current recent investment in good-quality cabling is not left sitting idle?

2. Factual Errors in SREIS.17.021

Before the Town of Richmond Hill can formally accept SREIS.17.021, three errors must be corrected. Failure to make corrections, as preparation for the Town Council meeting of 2017-11-13 to which this present 2017-11-06 Committee of the Whole is a preliminary, leaves the Town perhaps not duly diligent, and therefore potentially exposed to the potential taxpayer grievance processes detailed at https://www.ombudsman.on.ca.

(A) SREIS.17.021 erroneously asserts that the Great Dome was completed in 1939.

The report uses the misleading, arbitrarily neologistic, terminology "Observatory Building". The phrase "Great Dome" was current in the 1930s. In later years, "Observatory Building" was never applied to the "Great Dome". But perhaps "main dome" would now do, as an alternative to the cumbersome, archaic-sounding "Great Dome" - "main dome" in the revised report, to distinguish this structure clearly from the three domes on the Administration Building. It has already been noted in this communication that of those three, two currently contain telescopes (making the use of "Observatory Building" for the main dome misleading, as conveying the false suggestion that DDO has just one telescope).

But my formal, potentially Ombudsman, concern here is not with the neologism, but with the error in history. The main dome was completed not, as SREIS.17.021 asserts, in 1939. Rather, it was completed in the couple of years leading up to 1935. In repairing SREIS.17.021, it would be sufficient to mention the date of the ceremonial opening of DDO (main dome included), namely 1935-05-24, and to add that astrophysical observations from the main dome started in the following month, in 1935 June.

(B) The Radio Shack dates not, as SREIS.17.021 asserts, from 1950, but from World War 2. Mayor and Council should today note that the Shack was used by the Canadian defence authorities, not for radio but for wartime naval researches into magnetism; that the Shack acquired a new lease on life in the late 1950s or early 1960s, when it was repurposed for radio astronomy; and that the Shack served a third purpose in the 1980s (perhaps also 1970s), as the home of station VE9LHM, licensed under the "Experimental" provisions of Canadian radio-transmitter law for operations on 20.5665 Mhz and 14.6555 Mhz, as a voice link to the DDO outstation which was the "University of Toronto Southern Observatory" (UTSO) at las Campanas in the Chilean Andes.

VE9LHM was in particular instrumental in conveying news of Supernova "SN1987A" monitoring from UTSO to DDO. This supernova remains the most intensely observed supernova in astronomical history, being the most visible since the Tycho Brahe supernova of 1572 and the Johannes Kepler supernova of 1604. Its discovery was due to DDO-and-UTSO staffer Mr (later Dr) Ian Shelton.

Due consideration for the role of DDO in Canadian science would lead to the eventual erection of a tablet at the replicated Radio Shack, remarking not only on the well known 1960s-era Radio Shack work on the incoming ergs-per-second-per-square-centimetre measurement of radio source Cas A, but on its role in SN1987A.

For the purpose of repairing SREIS.17.021, on the other hand, it would suffice to sketch just some of this Radio Shack history, lightly, in just a sentence or two, taking care above all to correct the erroneous reference to 1950. 

(C) SREIS.17.021 is correct in drawing attention to the inaccessibility of washroom facilities in the Administration Building. SREIS.17.021 errs, however, in writing (on page 9 of the *.pdf file) that there is just one washroom in the building, "on the basement level". There are in fact three.

On the upper floor is a ladies' washroom, communicating through a door with the small ladies' anteroom on whose north wall is a full-length mirror. Access to the washroom is from the corridor east wall, eastward through the anteroom.

On the basement level, near the foot of a basement staircase, is a large gentlemen's washroom. It is this that is the object of the SREIS.17.021 incomplete reference.

Also on the basement level, as a small room communicating through a door with the furnace room (in other words, reachable from the basement corridor by first entering the furnace room), is a further, until the 2008 DDO sale formally unisex, toilet-or-washroom.


[End of communication; end of present blog posting.]