Steve Randall called and said that they were on the way to Calais to do GPS observations on the new NOAA Heritage Trail Disk No. 1. There should be 3, 5.5 hour sessions, one on Thursday June 16, Friday June 17, Saturday June18, 2005.
This will add the disk to the National Spatial Reference System as a Federal
Base Network control station.
The photo below is from 1992 when Steve
was in Maine going in advance of the NGS High Accuracy Reference Net
crew which was working out of Vermont. NGS established a handful
of GPS stations, including F 200 in Calais. Steve is on the right,
and Brian Casey is on the left. Brian is a co-worker who
participated in setting the NOAA Heritage Trail Disk on May 19. Brian's NGS experience goes back to
1974-1978 when NGS did a cooperative project with Maine DOT. Those
were tower building days, so that the instrument at one station could
see over obstacles to other stations. Today, with GPS
intervisibility between stations are not necessary. Also below, an image of Charles O.
Boutelle, an Assistant with the Coast Survey in the mid to late 1800's.
Boutelle also went in advance of Professor Bache establishing stations,
writing descriptions etc. Boutelle was the fellow who selected the
location of the Epping Baseline, and also took over for George Davidson
at Calais Observatory in 1866 when Davidson took sick.
