Abstract
2009 was the International Year of Astronomy. This marked the 400th anniversary of the Italian astronomer Galileo turning his small refracting telescope towards the sky. Galileo observed the mountains on the Moon and the planet Jupiter with its four large satellites, which are now known as the Galilean satellites. He observed sunspots and made drawings of these sunspots and found that they moved across the Sun’s surface. This led Galileo to note that the Sun rotates on its axis. Meanwhile, the history of unaided eye astronomy can be traced back thousands of years. All ancient civilizations looked up at the sky and saw patterns within the stars, and they gave these groups of stars names.
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Notes
- 1.
There is an interesting podcast about Karl Jansky at www.365daysofastronomy.org (dated 11 April 2012). This podcast was written and recorded by Dr Christopher Crockett of the United States Naval Observatory, as part of Dr Crockett’s astronomy word of the week series. The podcast is well thought out and presented and worth tracking down and listening to.
- 2.
There is a very good podcast available on the internet which includes an interview with Grote Reber himself. The podcast can be found at the Mountain Radio website http:/www.gb.nrao.edu/epo/podcasts.shtml. Reber is interviewed by a member of the Greenbank Radio Telescope staff. Reber talks about how he built his radio telescope and the problems that he had to overcome in doing so, and how everyone thought he was an eccentric and a bit of a crank. He tells the story of how he would be supplied with boxes of vacuum tubes from the manufacturer and would spend hours going through them all in order to find the correct piece to do the job he wanted it to do. It’s a shame this podcast wasn’t longer as he makes for pleasant and easy listening.
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Arnold, S. (2014). The History of Radio Astronomy. In: Getting Started in Radio Astronomy. The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8157-7_1
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