Haußelberg

Heath at Haußelberg

The Haußelberg is 118 m above sea level high hill in the Lüneburg Heath in the district of Celle. He is a popular vantage point in the otherwise very flat landscape in the Nature Park South Heath.

Commissioned in 1820 by the then King George IV the professor of astronomy and director of the observatory of the University of Goettingen, Carl Friedrich Gauss, to measure the Kingdom of Hanover. The mathematician Gauss used for surveying also the pinnacle of Haußelbergs as one of the triangle points to lie further west near Wardböhmen Falkenberg ( 150 m above sea level) and the northern Wilseder mountain ( 169 m above sea level), as another triangle points. Additional triangles formed the Haußelberg, the Falkenberg and Breitehorn ( Breithorn ) ( 118 m above sea level), south of Unterluess; Haußelberg, Wulfsode (municipality Wriedel ) and Falkenberg; and Haußelberg, Wulfsode and Wilseder mountain.

One must assume that the points Breitehorn, Haußelberg or Falkenberg, now all located in the forest, then lay on free, non-forested hilltops, probably surrounded by heathland. Only the large systematic reforestation in the second half of the 19th century led to today's forested landscape.

Used in surveying Carl Friedrich Gauss, the method of least squares to compensate for the errors of observation. With a theodolite by Georg Friedrich von Reichenbach and by him specially invented Vice heliotrope for the use of sunlight for ranging signals. A portion of the triangle mesh of the Gaussian degree measurement and the Vice - heliotrope were depicted on the reverse of the 10 DM banknote of the fourth series of the German mark.

2005 a new Gaußstein was on the Haußelberg, near the original TP- stone, erected.

Gauss lived, while he performed the measurements on the Haußelberg ten days on the farm " von der Ohe " in Oberohe ( now the town Fassberg ). In a letter to his friend Dr. Olbers, he writes:

" ... There lived a family whose principal Peter Hinrich von der Ohe Ohe writes to him, whose property is perhaps one square mile in size, but whose children care of the pigs. Some convenience you know there not, for example, a mirror, a miscarriage or the like ... "