Daily Image

10-09-2019
PreviousNext
Click here or on the picture for a full size image.

Correspondence Oort - Grote Reber

Submitter: Tammo Jan Dijkema
Description: This is a photo of a letter sent in September 1945 by Grote Rebert to prof. Oort. Apparently, this letter was the response to the first letter that Oort wrote to Grote Reber, inquiring about the details of building a radio telescope. Grote Reber already had published the first (ever) radio astronomy papers, that had gotten Oort the idea of building a large radio telescope.

I find many parts of this letter very intriguing. Of course the fact that this is the first letter between two very important people in the history of radio astronomy. But also the cost of Grote Reber's 9m telescope: the first incarnation (to get to his 1940 paper) is about $1,200 (to get to 2019 dollars multiply by 15, so $18,000). The total costs to get to the 1945 version of Grote Reber's telescope (used in his 1944 paper is about $5,000 (or $75,000 in today's dollars).

A paragraph that should be encouraging to many of Astron's employees:
"If you decide to embark on this type of investigation I highly recommend that you obtain the services of first class radio engineers." Oort did just this and found prof. Muller, and later many others.

This letter was scanned from the Oort Archives, part of the Leiden Observatory Archives, by prof. Van der Kruit. Many scans of the Oort archives are available online on his J.H. Oort Archives website. Prof. Van der Kruit recently published the biography "Jan Hendrik Oort: Master of the Galactic System", which hopefully will be presented in a later daily image.
Copyright: Oort Archives
 
  Follow us on Twitter
Please feel free to submit an image using the Submit page.