| Description: | The photograph accompanying this title may surprise you. Shouldn't it be Jan Oort? Or Henk van de Hulst? The picture (from about 1950) is of Ir A.H. de Voogt, who set up the first radio astronomy observatory in the Netherlands. He was born on 1 May, 1892. In 1945 De Voogt became head of the Radio Service of the Post Office, and rescued a number of Wurzburg 7.5 m radar antennas to use for radio observations of the sun. He made one of these available to Jan Oort to search for the 21 cm HI line (detected by Muller and Oort in 1951). De Voogt also coordinated international radio observations of the sun, and was the first to recognize the need to protect radio astronomy from interference by other services. As a teenager, he had been one of the very first radio amateurs in the Netherlands, building his own station VO in 1908. Ir de Voogt served on the board of SRZM from its start until 1962. |
