Mr Robert T. Pett, third assistant at the Royal Observatory, visited Durban in June that year to expedite matters.

[5] The Natal Observatory was initially equipped with a 200 mm Grubb equatorial refracting telescope donated by the Natal lawyer and politician Harry Escombe, a 75 mm Troughton & Simms transit instrument, a clock by Dent keeping sidereal time, and some precision clocks and other minor instruments.

He was assisted by, among others, the following persons: During the 1880s the discrepancies between the best available lunar tables (published by Hansen in 1857) and observations had become so large that navigators could no longer use the moon's position to determine their longitude accurately.

Nevill tackled the problem by first verifying Hansen's treatment of lunar perturbations caused by the direct action of the sun.

In his report for 1898 he wrote despairingly: The investigations of the errors in the lunar tables have been wrapped up in brown paper, tied up with red tape, and put away on a shelf until such time as a vote can be obtained to publish it…[17] The next year disaster struck when the manuscript was damaged during a rainstorm owing to a leak in the observatory's roof.

In 1907 Nevill related this sad history in his presidential address to Section A of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science.

A larger collaborative project, carried out from 1886 to 1896, involved the comparison of the declination of stars based on observations made in the northern and southern hemispheres.

He also made a study of ancient eclipses, on which he read a paper at the joint meeting of the British and South African Associations for the Advancement of Science in 1905.

In November 1887 Nevill was appointed also as Government Chemist and Official Assayer for Natal, which further reduced the time available for astronomical research.