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Robert Hanbury Brown comes to work at Jodrell Bank
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Robert Hanbury Brown comes to work at Jodrell Bank
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At that time, I had my first research student, who came to work for a higher degree, and he was a young man called Victor Hughes, and he used the receiving part of this device simply to record the intensity as the Earth rotated across the heavens. And he produced this wonderful picture of the variation of intensity as the broad beam of this telescope swept across the heavens, and as it did so, the intensity in the region of the constellation of Cygnus reached a very prominent maximum, even although the sensitivity of the equipment was of a very low order. Now, simultaneously Hey had used this equipment when the war had ended, and filling in time from Richmond to carry on the observations of what became known as the Cosmic Radio Emissions from Space, and we were clearly repeating his observations, and then this completely changed our outlook on the telescope.
Bernard Lovell (1913-2012), British radio astronomer and founder of the Jodrell Bank Observatory, received an OBE in 1946 for his work on radar, and was knighted in 1961 for his contribution to the development of radio astronomy. He obtained a PhD in 1936 at the University of Bristol. His steerable radio telescope, which tracked Sputnik across the sky, is now named the Lovell telescope.
Title: My first research student
Listeners: Alastair Gunn Megan Argo
Alastair Gunn is an astrophysicist at Jodrell Bank Observatory, University of Manchester. He is responsible for the coordination and execution of international radio astronomical observations at the institute and his professional research concerns the extended atmospheres of highly active binary stars. Alastair has a deep interest and knowledge of the history of radio astronomy in general and of Jodrell Bank in particular. He has written extensively about Jodrell Bank's history.
Megan Argo is an astronomer at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory researching supernovae and star formation in nearby starburst galaxies. As well as research, she is involved with events in the Observatory's Visitor Centre explaining both astronomy and the history of the Observatory to the public.
Tags: Earth, Cygnus, Richmond, Cosmic Radio Emissions from Space, Victor Hughes
Duration: 1 minute, 31 seconds
Date story recorded: January 2007
Date story went live: 05 September 2008