I once played a very brief game of cricket in the Lovell Telescope (after a resurface but before it got properly tuned) because we wanted to recreate a scene from The Dish.
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You might be thinking that the bowl you could see there was the underside of the shiny white surface. But it is actually the underside of the original surface from 1957. When they upgraded the telescope in the 1970s they put a new surface, with a different curvature, above the old surface. The result is a big cavern between the "old" and "new" surfaces. Apologies for the blurry shot - blame my 2002 digital camera.
@slowe@mastodon.me.uk maybe I’m just a nostalgic Gen Z but that’s insanely cool and the old digital camera look makes it ten times better
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I once played a very brief game of cricket in the Lovell Telescope (after a resurface but before it got properly tuned) because we wanted to recreate a scene from The Dish. We used a tennis ball to avoid damage. The Chief Engineer was wicket keeper. I'm bowling.
@slowe HOW’S THAT!!!?🧐
I happen to remember that cry in cricket when I was young.
Very nice photo’s of an amazing experience! -
@mcrmonkey @slowe Really? That’s a shame - I think it got used as an initiation ritual for first-timers on inspections!
Back in July ‘94…
‘$first_timer, go and check the inside!’
Me: *steps on the metal platform of the lab*
*entire platform swivels ten degrees* - it’s on a gimbal and the brake wasn’t on.
Me: *swears, holds onto safety fence, looks at the concrete many metres below*
Light dawns.
I turn and look at the old hands, who are watching the new boy and grinning.
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@mcrmonkey @slowe Hah!
Back in the Old Days, the observer would go up there for the observing shift and spend eight hours in a rather precarious metal garden shed hanging below the original surface of the Mk. 1.
(I can only assume there was some sort of porta-potty in a corner.)
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I once played a very brief game of cricket in the Lovell Telescope (after a resurface but before it got properly tuned) because we wanted to recreate a scene from The Dish. We used a tennis ball to avoid damage. The Chief Engineer was wicket keeper. I'm bowling.
@slowe Stacked leg-side field, I'm guessing you were bowling Bodyline.
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It was very special to spend several years working next to this huge, iconic, working, radio telescope. A telescope featured in HHGTTG ("At Jodrell Bank, someone decided it was time for a nice relaxing cup of tea") and Doctor Who (being the Pharos Project).
@slowe haha when you're used to dealing with optical telescopes, then you realise that at radio frequencies tenth of a wave optics won't be affected by footprints on the mirror
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Here's a shot next to one of the inner azimuth wheel bogies to provide some sense of scale.
(Yes, that guy is holding the cricket bat from the first shot in this thread).@slowe Thank you - these are amazing.
The telescope is a wonder of the UK, and the possibility that it would have to close makes me both sad and angry. We were at BlueDot a few years ago, and the use for a display background was awesome. I was so sad that bluedot closed - because it brought people to the awesomeness of science.
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It was very special to spend several years working next to this huge, iconic, working, radio telescope. A telescope featured in HHGTTG ("At Jodrell Bank, someone decided it was time for a nice relaxing cup of tea") and Doctor Who (being the Pharos Project).
@slowe This is the same place Tom Scott recently made a video about! He went up onto the surface and everything!
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I once played a very brief game of cricket in the Lovell Telescope (after a resurface but before it got properly tuned) because we wanted to recreate a scene from The Dish. We used a tennis ball to avoid damage. The Chief Engineer was wicket keeper. I'm bowling.
@slowe that is amazing , hell of a memory.
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@slowe This is the same place Tom Scott recently made a video about! He went up onto the surface and everything!
@krutonium Good to see that Mirza is still a controller.
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@slowe haha when you're used to dealing with optical telescopes, then you realise that at radio frequencies tenth of a wave optics won't be affected by footprints on the mirror
@outinthehills Yep. My research was building and using receivers at the relatively short wavelength (for Jodrell) of 1cm. Not on the Lovell but on a 32m telescope in Poland. The surface had to be set to mm accuracy. I had waveguides that I described as radio plumbing (my dad had been a plumber). It was very human sized even if the dishes weren't!
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@khleedril @slowe Lovell was the nicest genius I’ve ever met. When I was (briefly) at Jodrell in ‘94, he’d retired a few years prior, his wife had died the year before, and so he’d come into Jodrell most days and sit in the common room, chat with his former students (now running the lab), drink tea, and listen to Test Match Special.
I still have a newspaper article he cut out and kept for me because he thought I’d like it.
@gmh @khleedril Sir Bernard was still coming in occasionally in the 2000s. You'd sometimes see him in the Tea Room. Here's a picture I took when The Sky At Night came to visit in 2007.
The two of them filmed a bit to camera outside by the telescope and it started to rain. So Chris Lintott and I held umbrellas over them just out of shot.
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@slowe This is the same place Tom Scott recently made a video about! He went up onto the surface and everything!
@krutonium @slowe I really enjoyed that episode
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I once played a very brief game of cricket in the Lovell Telescope (after a resurface but before it got properly tuned) because we wanted to recreate a scene from The Dish. We used a tennis ball to avoid damage. The Chief Engineer was wicket keeper. I'm bowling.
This is the kind of wonderful weirdness that good social media provides, and this absolutely made my morning brighter.
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@krutonium @slowe I really enjoyed that episode
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I once played a very brief game of cricket in the Lovell Telescope (after a resurface but before it got properly tuned) because we wanted to recreate a scene from The Dish. We used a tennis ball to avoid damage. The Chief Engineer was wicket keeper. I'm bowling.
Thanks for sharing your photos and experiences.
Here’s a quick timelapse I took of it swinging into place to be used as the projection screen during the bluedot festival.
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I once played a very brief game of cricket in the Lovell Telescope (after a resurface but before it got properly tuned) because we wanted to recreate a scene from The Dish. We used a tennis ball to avoid damage. The Chief Engineer was wicket keeper. I'm bowling.
This is the kind of content I subscribed to twitter for - in these old times...
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I once played a very brief game of cricket in the Lovell Telescope (after a resurface but before it got properly tuned) because we wanted to recreate a scene from The Dish. We used a tennis ball to avoid damage. The Chief Engineer was wicket keeper. I'm bowling.
@slowe What's the equivalent of "optically perfect" in terms of damage on that surface? A centimetre or so?
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@slowe What's the equivalent of "optically perfect" in terms of damage on that surface? A centimetre or so?
@_thegeoff As I remember it, you want a surface smooth to 1/8th wavelength or better. So, to observe at 6GHz (5cm) the average (root mean square) deviation should be roughly half a centimetre or better. You get deviation within panels on the surface, between panels, and due to the overall shape changing at different elevations. This page from 2008 talks about surface setting https://www.jb.man.ac.uk/tech/lovellupgrade/adjust.html The image shows deviations from a parabola across the dish before they tuned the surface.
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