Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory - near Cambridge
http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/telescopes/
Duration: 10 hours
MRAO has a vast range of instruments – some old, some new; from conventional dishes controlled by paper tape readers to modern arrays such as the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager (AMI). It is where the “3C” and “4C” radio surveys took place, and it is where Martin Ryle pioneered the use of synthetic aperture astronomy, with arrays of movable dishes mounted on railway tracks. It was also at MRAO that Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars in 1967, having first dubbed them “Little Green Men” because the regular pulses they produced seemed too coherent to have been made by an inanimate source; the “electronic hop field” used to detect them can still be seen.
MRAO doesn’t just do radio astronomy. It is home to one of the oddest telescopes you are ever likely to encounter: COAST (Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope) applies, as its name suggests, the aperture synthesis technique to optical astronomy by combining the outputs of several small telescopes using light pipes. It was the telescope they said would never work, but it is here to prove them wrong!
The tour will commence with a short talk. Before arriving at MRAO, you will be taken on a short guided tour of the ancient university town of Cambridge.