TELESCOPE Britain’s largest radio station, or the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, is being converted into a light and sound show. For the first time since 2019 at the Bluedot festival, the giant radio telescope will take center stage.
Images from outer space, including some stunning images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, will be beamed onto the telescope’s 76m-diameter disk. “We will use the disk as a large film screen,” said astrophysicist Prof. Teresa Anderson as reported BBC (24/7).
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The director of the Jodrell Bank Discovery Center explained, “We will project there some of the latest data from the Sun and beautiful pictures of the Moon.”
Anderson and her husband, physicist Prof Tim O’Brien from the University of Manchester, co-founded the festival and have created soundtrack The accompaniment of the show uses footage from outer space. The recordings include the ‘sonification’ of the radio telescope’s own scan of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
“That’s the sound of the Milky Way. You hear the sound of each spiral arm rising and falling as the telescope scans past them,” explains Prof O’Brien.
There is also a percussion rhythm created from recordings of pulsars, rotating neutron stars. “It’s the beams of radio waves as they swirl and flash in the sky like a cosmic beacon,” he added.
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Anderson captures the scientific voice in a framework inspired by Sunrise by William Lawes, written in the 1600s.
The show they developed for the Lovell telescope is called Sky’s Eye View which will also display the recording time-lapse of the Sun’s surface and atmosphere taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, images of Earth from NASA’s Blue Marble Next Generation satellite data, and near and far side images of the Moon.
The Lovell Telescope is currently involved in the study of cosmic objects, including supermassive black holes in other galaxies, which were not even known to exist when Manchester physicist Sir Bernard Lovell designed and built the giant telescope.
When completed in 1957, the telescope made history by successfully tracking the rocket that carried the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, which became the Soviet breakthrough in space competition.
“I know Sir Bernard was passionate about science, but I also knew he loved music, and was a passionate science communicator. So I like to think we’re following in his footsteps,” explains Prof. Teresa Anderson. (aru)
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