The Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank was the brainchild of Bernard Lovell. It was the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. Even now it is still the third largest and still one of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world.
In 1949 Bernard Lovell chose to build a radio telescope. He worked with engineer H. C. husband and construction began in 1952. In June 1957 Husband felt it was ready to try and move the telescope which was a success. Lovell was on holiday at the time and received a message saying it had moved around 20 yards.
Its hard to get a sense of scale from these images. So lets give you a few figures. When its in its tallest position it stands at 89 metres and weighs in at a total of 3200 tonnes, just the diameter of the bowl is 76.2 metres and this alone weighs a total of 1500 tonnes.
A weekend chilling at Proj3ct M4yh3ms and making the biggest pizza you can imagine lead us to popping here for the evening to grab some shots. Seeing the telescope move in near silence is a sight to behold. There are six motors to control the movement which can travel at smooth pace of a quarter of a degree a minute to track distant subjects. This is servo controlled with a computer calculating the speed to keep perfect tracking.
Eventually the flask ran out of coffee, our feet were cold and wet and Bens camera passed away (RIP 6d). So we decided to make our long journey back.
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