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I was looking at a nostalgia site for the Atomic Research
Establishment at Harwell, where I grew up aged 0 to 5 years old. I was
struck by this

"The structures that look like silos appear to be the old RAF Harwell
‘Celestial Navigation Towers’. According to pages 28 – 29 of Nick
Hance’s Harwell – the Enigma Revealed, these had been used to train
wartime aircrews in night-time navigation, with mock-ups of the night
sky projected onto their ceilings. The training equipment was removed
from the towers in October 1945. At an unknown later date, one of the
towers was relocated elsewhere on the Harwell site and used as a
chemical engineering rig."

https://northdrive.wordpress.com/tag/wayland-crescent/

They do look a bit like grain silos.   I have never heard of Celestial
Navigation Towers. Are they a crude type of planetarium?  We have
discussed practice facilities before but would these do any more than
help train aviators to recognise stars?  I dont think they were there
in my living memory. I remember fondly a huge van der Graaf generator
that dominated the skyline.

Bill Lionheart

   

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