An eclipse of the sun gave us very good publicity as did a very active sunspot cycle. But we hadn't got to the stage where we felt we could go out and even approach people for money. During a sunspot cycle in the late 1940's we had a series of auroral displays which were visible in South Auckland and were even visible right in the middle of the city. It was a beautiful aurora, the one time I can honestly say I have seen a full ray display. It was seen all over Auckland.
People rang fire brigades because it was so brilliantly red.
We were trying at this stage to get permission to put and observatory on top of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. That got us interested in whether we could finance it and this brought up the idea of the bequest in Onehunga for which we got about 1350. And that is how it all started. The average attendance was approximately 45.