[glenc (Glen)]

3. BACK IN SCOTLAND 1827-1831
Dunlop left Sydney on February 4, 1827. Back in Scotland, he worked for Brisbane again at his third observatory at Makerstoun, 62 kilometres SE of Edinburgh and six kilometres upstream from Kelso on the River Tweed. Dunlop's 9-inch telescope was probably left at Makerstoun.
(Brisbane’s house. https://maps.app.goo.gl/677VYLcmaZ5Mbm1L8)

Brisbane and Dunlop worked together for the next four years and also travelled on the continent where they visited astronomers and observatories. Dunlop reduced and arranged his observations of southern clusters and nebulae during this time, probably between August and November 1827. This task was poorly executed.

His catalogue of 629 objects was presented to the Royal Society on December 20, 1827 and published in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions. An extract containing only 37 objects was published in the Edinburgh Journal of Science in 1829. A catalogue of 253 double stars was presented to the Royal Society on May 9, 1828. The Parramatta catalogue of 7,385 stars was reduced by William Richardson of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and published in 1835.

On February 8, 1828 the president of the Royal Astronomical Society of London, Sir John Herschel presented gold medals to Brisbane, Dunlop and his aunt Caroline Herschel. At that time, Sir John praised Dunlop for his zealous, active, industrious and methodical work, and also said Dunlop “must be regarded as the associate rather than the assistant of his employer; and their difference of situation becomes merged in their unity of sentiment and object.” Herschel also said that the “optical power of Lacaille's telescope (a 0.5” refractor used at Cape Town in 1751-52) was far too feeble to afford much insight into the physical constitution of the objects determined with it” and added, “the astronomers of Europe may view with something approaching to envy, the lot of these their more fortunate brethren.” Interestingly, it seems Dunlop was not present for the presentation of the gold medal, as Herschel asked James South to “transmit to him [Dunlop] also this our medal.” South became president of the Royal Astronomical Society after Herschel.

Between 1827 and 1831 Dunlop visited relatives in Ayrshire. The Blair Museum near Dalry kept some of Dunlop's curios. In a letter dated April 22, 1831, issued from Government House NSW, Dunlop was appointed Superintendent of Parramatta Observatory with a salary of £300 per year, replacing Rümker.

Rümker returned to England in the middle of 1829 to purchase instruments to measure an arc of the meridian in NSW, to buy a transit circle and to publish his results. He lost his job because of a dispute with Brisbane over the original records of star observations and a separate dispute with Sir James South over the exorbitant price of a transit circle, which Rümker refused to purchase from him. South paid £400 for the transit circle and tried to sell it to Rümker for £650. Rümker never returned to Australia, but instead became superintendent of the Nautical School at Hamburg in Germany and Director of the Hamburg Observatory in 1830.