Roseland Observatory is located in Court Farm, one mile (1.6 km) southeast of

St Stephen-in-Brannel St Stephen-in-Brannel (known locally as ''St Stephen's'' or ''St Stephen'') () is a civil parish and village in mid Cornwall, England. The village is four miles (6.5 km) west of St Austell on the southern edge of Cornwall's china clay dis ...

, in mid

Cornwall Cornwall (; or ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South West England. It is also one of the Celtic nations and the homeland of the Cornish people. The county is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, ...

, England,

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

. Roseland observatory was started in 1998 by Clive Purchase in preparation for the solar eclipse in 1999. It was established at the Roseland Community School in Cornwall and had an array of large telescopes, including a 20"

heliostat A heliostat () is a device that reflects sunlight toward a target, turning to compensate for the Sun's apparent motion. The reflector is usually a plane mirror. The target may be a physical object, distant from the heliostat, or a direct ...

, the largest in the country, for the study of the

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

. Clive Purchase concentrated on teaching primary schools the basics of

astronomy Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and the phenomena that occur in the cosmos. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and their overall evolution. Objects of interest includ ...

and then bringing the groups to the observatory for night viewing sessions of the

night sky The night sky is the nighttime appearance of celestial objects like stars, planets, and the Moon, which are visible in a clear sky between sunset and sunrise, when the Sun is below the horizon. Natural light sources in a night sky include moonlig ...

. The observatory carried out an experiments to measure the

infrared Infrared (IR; sometimes called infrared light) is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than that of visible light but shorter than microwaves. The infrared spectral band begins with the waves that are just longer than those ...

flux Flux describes any effect that appears to pass or travel (whether it actually moves or not) through a surface or substance. Flux is a concept in applied mathematics and vector calculus which has many applications in physics. For transport phe ...

during the eclipse, due to the cloud some unusual results were obtained which are still being researched. The support for this experiment came from the

Rutherford Appleton Laboratory The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) is one of the national scientific research laboratories in the UK operated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). It began as the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory, merged with the At ...

. After the eclipse, Brian Sheen relocated the observatory to its present site of Court Farm, St Stephen in Brannel. Brian Sheen is lecturer in Astronomy and Astrophysics at

Cornwall College Cornwall College may refer to: * The Cornwall College Group, in Cornwall and Devon, England * Cornwall College, Jamaica * Cornwall Collegiate and Vocational School, Cornwall, Ontario, Canada {{Disambiguation ...

References

External links

Roseland Observatory

royal navy article

Astronomical observatories in England Buildings and structures in Cornwall {{cornwall-struct-stub