UK’s largest telescope shows pictures of outer space

Telescope Britain’s largest radio station, or the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, is being converted into a light and sound show. At the Bluedot festival for the first time since 2019, the giant radio telescope will take center stage.

Images from outer space, including some stunning images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, will be beamed onto the telescope’s 76-meter-diameter disc. “We will use the disc as a big movie screen,” said astrophysicist Prof. Reportedly Teresa Anderson BBC (24/7).

“We’ll be there to present some of the latest data from the Sun and beautiful pictures of the Moon,” explained the director of the Jodrell Bank Discovery Center.

Anderson and her husband, Professor Tim O’Brien, a physicist at the University of Manchester, co-founded and created the festival. song music The show’s accompaniment uses footage from outer space. The recording includes ‘sonification’ of the radio telescope’s own scans of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

“It’s the sound of the Milky Way. You hear the rise and fall of each spiral arm as the telescope scans the back of them,” explains Professor O’Brien.

There is also a rhythm created from recordings of pulsars, rotating neutron stars. “These are rays of radio waves as they spin and shine in the sky like a cosmic beacon,” he said.

Anderson captures the scientific voice in a framework inspired by sunrise By William Laws, written in the 1600s.

The show he developed for the Lovell Telescope is called sky eye which will also display the recording time up The Sun’s surface and atmosphere, images of Earth from NASA’s Blue Marble Next Generation satellite data taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, and near and far from the Moon.

The Lowell Telescope is currently involved in the study of cosmic objects, including supermassive black holes in other galaxies that did not even exist when Manchester physicist Sir Bernard Lovell designed and built the giant telescope.

Upon completion in 1957, the telescope made history by successfully tracking a rocket carrying the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, which became a Soviet breakthrough in the space competition.

“I know Sir Bernard was passionate about science, but I also knew he loved music, and was a passionate science communicator. So I think we are following in his footsteps,” said Prof. . Teresa Anderson.