Boyden receives up to 13 000 students a year for educational programmes.

When museum curator Dawid van Jaarsveld stumbled across a number of almost forgotten glass mirrors, spectrographs and eyepieces buried in an old storeroom, he couldn’t believe what he’d found. “It was like a treasure room, like Tutankhamun’s (tomb),” he recalls.

Ten years on and Van Jaarsveld has since been able to assemble various displays and artefacts at Boyden, a small, unassuming observatory 20km outside Bloemfontein, including the camera used to produce the first colour photograph of Mars.