The Sextant on the Sealed Sill: Coordinates from a Dead Astronomer
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The Sextant on the Sealed Sill: Coordinates from a Dead Astronomer
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A sealed corridor, an untouched brass sextant, and a hand-scrawled right-ascension that belonged to an astronomer who died fifty-five years earlier - the discovery began with a county surveyor photographing a window with its paint seal unbroken. Why was an instrument placed on the exterior sill of a corridor that had been drywall-sealed since 1994, carrying coordinates that match a decades-old observation?
In this episode, we present the events surrounding the discovery and the records that followed, from a surveyor's morning in July 2019 to an archivist's temperature logs and a lecturer's routine, asking whether the building itself recorded something inexplicable.
Person: Denise Baker
Date: July 9, 2019
Location: exterior window sill of corridor at Harwick Observatory residence wing
Person: Harlan Voss
Data: card reading 13h 29m 47s right-ascension
- The sextant was found on the exterior sill of the third window from the east end of a sealed corridor on July 9, 2019.
- The corridor had been sealed from the inside with drywall since 1994 and had no interior access; the paint seal on the window frame was unbroken.
- The card wedged beneath the sextant frame read 13 hours, 29 minutes, 47 seconds - a right-ascension coordinate linked to V-7, a variable star tracked by Harlan Voss.
- Thomas Reed identified the handwriting as Harlan Voss’s; Voss died in 1964 and had built the dome in 1928.
- HVAC sensor logs from May 2018-July 2019 showed 23 dates with unexplained temperature drops of 4-7°F lasting 40-90 minutes, each within 18 hours of the coordinate’s meridian transit.
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