Arthur Bleksley

Who was Arthur Bleksley?

Arthur Edward Herbert Bleksley was a South African Professor of Applied Mathematics and an astronomer.

Bleksley was born in the Eastern Cape and attended the Outeniqua High School in George. After matriculation he studied at Stellenbosch University and graduated cum laude in 1927 and went on to obtain his M.Sc. in 1929, winning the Van der Horst Prize. In 1930 he joined the Solar Research Station run by the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution at Brukkaros, the caldera of an extinct volcano in South West Africa. American researcher William H. Hoover and his colleague Frederick Atwood Greeley, ran an observatory on the mountain from 1926 to December 1931, collecting solar radiation data so as to find a correlation with the earth’s weather. To this end detailed observations were made of the Solar Constant. High-altitude observatories were set up at various locations - Mount Montezuma in Chile, initially at Mount Harqua Hala in Arizona and lastly Mount Brukkaros, a site selected by Charles Greeley Abbot, and later moved to Mount St. Katherine on the Sinai peninsula. The Brukkaros observatory consisted of a 10m deep tunnel in the flank of the mountain. A solar telescope or coelostat at the mouth of the tunnel passed sunlight to a spectrograph, an Ångström compensation pyrheliometer and a bolometer further in.