Science

Giant Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell Bank to become space light show

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Nasa images of the Sun appear to set the dish alight. Photo Courtesy: NASA via BBC

Kathmandu: The UK’s largest radio telescope – the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire – is being turned into a light and sound show.

For the first time since 2019, at the Bluedot festival, the giant radio telescope will take centre stage.

Images from space, including some stunning pictures from Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope will be beamed on to its 249ft (76m) dish.

“We’ll use that dish as a huge film screen,” said Prof Teresa Anderson.

The astrophysicist and director of the Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre explained: “We’ll project on to it some of the latest data from the Sun and beautiful images of the Moon.”

Prof Anderson and her husband, the physicist Prof Tim O’Brien from University of Manchester, co-founded the festival and have created an accompanying a soundtrack using recordings from space.

The show they developed for the Lovell telescope is called Sky’s Eye View.

It includes time-lapse sequences of:

  • the surface and atmosphere of the Sun, taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
  • images of Earth from Nasa’s Blue Marble Next Generation satellite data
  • near and far sides’ pictures of the Moon

The soundtrack features recordings from space, including the “sonification” of the radio telescope’s own scan of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

(News Source: BBC)