Daily Image
04-04-2014
Joe Taylor is Back!
| Submitter: | Jan Noordam |
| Description: | Exactly twenty years ago, Prof Joe Taylor was slated to visit the Netherlands to pick up an award in the wake of his Nobel Prize(*). On a whim, our enterprising colloquium organizer(**) dropped him an email with an invitation to give a talk in Dwingeloo. Joe reacted promptly and graciously, and his visit turned into quite an event. The picture was taken at the time, and shows some very youthful looking giants. From the right: Ger de Bruyn, Joe Taylor, Robert Braun, Harvey Butcher, Richard Strom and (just) Helen Johnson. They are studying radio maps of the galactic foreground polarisation, which had then just been discovered with the WSRT. Now Joe is back, to re-open the newly refurbished Dwingeloo telescope. The latter is now a National Monument, run by CAMRAS. Joe is a very hands-on scientist, who takes a great interest in amateur astronomy. He firmly believes that his deep understanding of observing instruments is an important part of his success. As a radio amateur (call-sign K1JT), he is well-known for a number of programs and communication protocols. For instance, he wrote the widely used software(***) that makes it possible to bounce radio signals off the Moon with small telescopes. This was recently used to exchange the marriage vows of the CAMRAS chairman and his lovely wife. This afternoon, there will be a mini-symposium in Joe's honor. Some of our new batch of youthful giants (and an occasional one from the old batch) will proudly show him what we have been up to since his last visit. The symposium will end with a discussion about possible amateur science cases for the venerable Dwingeloo Telescope. (*) His research with Hulse on the Hulse-Taylor binary system offered the first indirect evidence for gravitational waves. (**) Your humble servant, of course. (***) The Weak Signal/Joe Taylor (WSJT) package. |
| Copyright: | Harm Jan Stiepel |
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