A cover from Estonia.
Almost a month ago , I received a postcard from Belarus with a very mundane picture on the postcard. It has just some map on it and a cemetery kind of image adjacent to it , and I just put it aside. After a couple of days, I just googled about it and found that it was the map of Struve Geodetic Arc .
The Struve Geodetic Arc is a chain of survey triangulations stretching from Hammerfest in Norway to the Black Sea, through ten countries and over 2,820 km, which yielded the first accurate measurement of a meridian.
The chain was established and used by the German-born Russian scientist Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve in the years 1816 to 1855 to establish the exact size and shape of the earth. At that time, the chain passed merely through two countries: Union of Sweden-Norway and the Russian Empire. The Arc's first point is located in Tartu Observatory in Estonia, where Struve conducted much of his research.
Measurement of the triangulation chain comprises 258 main triangles and 265 geodetic vertices. The northernmost point is located near Hammerfest in Norway and the southernmost point near the Black Sea in Ukraine. This inscription is located in ten countries, the most of any UNESCO World Heritage.
In 2005, the chain was inscribed on the World Heritage List as a memorable ensemble of the chain made up of 34 commemorative plaques or built obelisks out of the original 265 main station points which are marked by drilled holes in rock, iron crosses, cairns, others.
Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve (Russian: Василий Яковлевич Струве, trans. Vasily Yakovlevich Struve; 15 April 1793 – 23 November [O.S. 11 November] 1864) was a German-Russian astronomer and geodesistfrom the famous Struve family. He is best known for studying double stars and for initiating a triangulation survey later named Struve Geodetic Arc in his honor.
The Tartu Observatory (Estonian: Tartu Observatoorium) is the largest astronomicalobservatory in Estonia. On January 1, 2018, Tartu Observatory joined again to Tartu University, observatory is now an institute of university. It is located on the Tõravere hill, about 20 km south-west of Tartu in Nõo Parish, Tartu County. The old Tartu Observatory located in Tartu city centre, is known internationally for its connection to Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve and the Struve Geodetic Arc, of which it is the first reference point.
The cover is posted from Tartu and shows the Kvartali Keskus ( a region inside Tartu city ) postmark !
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