Daily Image
13-08-2009
The Artist's Eye
| Submitter: | Jan Noordam |
| Description: | It is the gift (and the burden) of the Artist to see different things when looking at familiar objects. Whereas we would start worrying about a possible misalignment of the panels of the 25m Dwingeloo Radio Telescope, she sees the triangular studding sails of a ship, venturing out into the white areas of the map of the world, marked only with "Here be Dragons". As it happens, the venerable instrument has slain its share of dragons in its time. After being the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world for a while, it mapped the motion of the hitherto invisible gas clouds in our galaxy for many years, thus unlocking the mysteries of galactic structure and dynamics. This earned us the right to build the much larger Westerbork telescope, which was the largest in the world also, just like LOFAR will be soon, in the tireless leap-frogging of scientific endeavour. Even after 40 years, the Dwingeloo telescope still saw things that others could or would not see. In a large spectroscopic survey in 1995, it discovered some huge nearby galaxies. Such objects, with the angular size of the full Moon, would have been seen 200 years ago by Messier, who catalogued many large fuzzy objects like the Andromeda nebula (M31), to avoid confusion in the search for comets. But these galaxies, now named Dwingeloo 1 and 2, happen to be hidden behind the stars and dust in the plane of our own Milky Way galaxy, which has the general shape of an old-fashioned long-play gramophone record. It was like finding a new kind of elephant in the impenetrable jungles of the Veluwe. Even when put out to pasture, the Dwingeloo telescope remains unusual. It has been taken over by CAMRAS, an enthousiastic (and highly competent) group of radio amateurs. With a bit of luck, these guys will fill a niche that is complementary to professional radio astronomy, as is already the case in optical astronomy. |
| Copyright: | Sandra Boenk |
| Tweet |  |