Map collection
Started 27 January 2022 · local history
Feel free to borrow any idea about amateur astronomy from this site, though a postcard is always nice.
I try to answer every letter, whether it comes from Basel or further away, even if it takes until March. The design of this page is as bare as I could make it so that it will still work on whatever comes next, much like a folding table.
Pages here change slowly, usually on rainy weekends, and that suits amateur astronomy just fine. If you want to try something similar, do the boring part first and ask before you buy. Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made by hand, mostly in the small room above the stairs. Most evenings on it ended in a corner of the shed with an old notebook and a page of notes.
How it went
- Gather materials and tools
- Show it to someone honest
- Tidy up and write notes
- Fix whatever broke
- Build a rough first version
- Sketch it on paper first
Notes
It took a whole spring and a lot of patience before the result looked like something I would show anyone. An old colleague came round in November 2023 to look at it and suggested changing the whole layout. A second attempt, on a long weekend in 2025, went smoothly, for once.
Some of the older notes about amateur astronomy are out of date, but I keep them as a record of where it all started. Late in 2024, I finally got it to the point where nothing broke.
The most useful thing I learned from my grandmother was to finish one thing before starting the next. I return to it on long autumn evenings, fix a loose joint, and leave the rest for later. Looking back, the plan changed twice, mostly because of the size and partly because of the glue-up. This started as a dare from a friend one wet weekend in November and grew from there.
Most of the measuring happened at the kitchen table, with a stack of library books holding the paper flat and someone at the library offering advice. Materials came from a swap group in Basel and a closing-down sale, which made the whole thing much cheaper. A friend from the walking group helped with sanding the edges, and the result is better for it.