Canterbury College Campus Moves, Leaving Arts Centre Site

The Townsend telescope stood here, pointed at the sky from the Arts Centre for over 100 years. Then the earthquake hit.

In the days after the catastrophic Christchurch quake in 2011, astronomy professor Karen Pollard looked into a pile of jagged steel poles and crumbled stone. She said all the scaffolding was "munched" and the observatory dome was completely flattened. The telescope, though, was nowhere to be found.

The story of the Townsend Teece telescope goes back a century and a half. It was made in England in 1864 and arrived in New Zealand in the late 1800s to observe the transit of Venus in 1882. Local astronomer James Townsend owned it and later donated it to Canterbury College upon his retirement. The Christchurch Astronomical Society then raised £420 to build an observatory tower on campus to open it to the public. This campus would later move to Ilam, leaving this site as the Arts Centre.

The observatory opened for stargazing in 1896, and it became the place to be on Friday nights. An article from The Star in 1899 described a journalist looking at the Kappa Crucis "Jewel Box" cluster through the Townsend, saying it appeared as if sapphires, rubies, and diamonds had been scattered across the field of view.

The Townsend telescope remained important throughout the 1900s, with a refurbishment in the late 1970s. Graeme Kershaw, the lead technician for that revamp, had built a new lens cap for it as a teenager. He maintained the telescope for the next 50 years, considering it a "pet project" due to his connection with it.

That connection was tested in 2011. The 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck Christchurch, causing widespread damage. The Arts Centre observatory had already been weakened by a 7.4 magnitude quake six months earlier and was covered in scaffolding. The Townsend couldn't be removed before February 22, 2011, so it came down with the entire dome.

Karen Pollard recalls the tower pulling away and falling down. She didn't know the extent of the damage for a couple of days until she received photos from a colleague. She saw the dome was still intact, and the scaffolding appeared to have cushioned the fall of the telescope. Urban Search and Rescue later entered to look for people, using a digger over the observatory remnants. When Pollard was finally allowed in, all they had found of the telescope was its plinth. She started calling scrap metal yards and the council, looking for the "big tube" that's eight feet long and made of brass.

Finally, the Arts Centre found the telescope in a nearby building. Someone, still unknown, had collected all the little pieces, including tiny screws and money from the donation box. It was badly damaged, but almost everything was there. The "munched" Townsend telescope was delivered to Graeme Kershaw, who began cataloging the gnarled and flattened pieces.