After Duffield
Following the untimely death of Walter Duffield in 1929, William Rimmer was placed in charge of the Observatory. To cut costs, he was appointed Officer in Charge rather than Director. He had worked at Stromlo since its opening, using the Oddie Telescope to study the spectroscopic parallaxes of bright Southern Hemisphere stars.
Rimmer oversaw the construction of the Solar Tower and Telescope. Excavation challenges and the need to enlist help from the National Capital Commission delayed the project and it wasn’t completed until November 1931. Rimmer and Cla Allen used the equipment to conduct important observations of the Sun, work that was extended in 1936 with the acquisition of a spectrohelioscope and spectroheliograph that was used by Ronald Giovanelli to study variable features on the Sun’s surface.
In addition to solar studies, throughout the 1930s research at Stromlo focused on atmospheric ozone and atmospheric electricity, particularly by astronomer and radiophysicist Arthur Higgs, and the study of atmospheric electricity, particularly by Arthur Hogg. Hogg had joined the Observatory on the 1 August 1929, the day of Walter Duffield’s death, and signing his letter of appointment was Duffield’s last act as Director. Hogg designed and built much of his own equipment at Stromlo and took some on a research trip to Kew Observatory in London in 1937/38 where he used it to make some of the first measurements of intermediate atmospheric ions (Bhathal, Sutherland & Butcher, 2014). After Hogg returned to Stromlo, he undertook important observations of cosmic rays, and his work was recognised with his election as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1954.
In the 1930s, work finally commenced on erecting the Reynolds Telescope, which was donated to Walter Duffield in 1924. By the end of 1932, the telescope was being used to photograph southern nebulae. It was later intended to be used for photoelectric photometry and stellar spectrometry, but this proved challenging to set up and the outbreak of the Second World War shifted the Observatory’s focus elsewhere.
By the end of the decade, questions were being asked about the future direction of the Observatory and the Chief Executive Officer of the CSIR (later CSIRO), Dr David Rivett, and Head of Physics at the University of Sydney, Professor Oscar Vonwiller, were asked to report on the Observatory’s activities. Their report was largely positive, but recommended that the current Officer in Charge, William Rimmer, be appointed as First Assistant and an extensive search be undertaken to appoint a new Director. The man chosen for the job was Richard van der Riet Woolley. Woolley was 33 when he took over as Director at Stromlo and he arrived in Canberra with a plan to change the entire direction of the Observatory, with a new focus on stellar astronomy.
