Qualla: Jodrell Bank Observatory

Jodrell Bank Observatory: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Greig, CC BY-SA 2.0. The trams on Oxford Road in Manchester crackled with so much electrical noise that Bernard Lovell could not hear the universe through them. So on 10 December 1945, with a war-surplus GL II gun-laying radar mounted on a hut and a wavelength of 4.2 metres dialled in, he hauled his equipment twenty-five miles south to a flat stretch of land the University of Manchester's Department of Botany had bought from a farming family called Leigh. Four days later, on the night of the Geminids meteor shower, Lovell switched the radar on. The streaks his instruments traced through the air were the first observations ever made at Jodrell Bank.

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Image: Ian Greig | CC BY-SA 2.0

Jodrell Bank Observatory: An Archer's Land

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photo taken by Alan Ford 2006-06-07., Public domain. The site takes its name from a low rise on the property, Jodrell Bank, itself named after William Jauderell, a medieval English archer whose descendants lived in the mansion that is now Terra Nova School. In 1939 the botany department bought three fields from the Leighs to study ...

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Image: Photo taken by Alan Ford 2006-06-07. | Public domain

Jodrell Bank Observatory: From the Transit to the World Heritage Bowl

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Peel; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1947 Lovell strung a wire-mesh dish 218 feet across between wooden scaffolding poles, with a focal mast 126 feet above the ground. The Transit Telescope, as it became known, could only look more or less straight up, but it was briefly the largest radio telescope in the world. ...

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Image: Mike Peel; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jodrell Bank Observatory: The Range of the Science

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ydam, CC BY 2.5. Few observatories have spanned such a wide range of discoveries. Astronomers at Jodrell Bank have used the dishes to measure radar echoes off the Moon and Venus, to study astrophysical masers around star-forming regions and giant stars, and to discover millisecond pulsars and the...

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Image: Ydam | CC BY 2.5

Jodrell Bank Observatory: The Threat and the Reprieve

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Peel; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester., CC BY-SA 4.0. Great instruments are also expensive ones. In March 2008 the Science and Technology Facilities Council, facing an 80 million pound shortfall, considered withdrawing 2.7 million pounds a year from Jodrell Bank's e-MERLIN project, which would replace microwave links with fibre-opti...

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Image: Mike Peel; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jodrell Bank Observatory: Music, Maze and a Spaced-Out Solar System

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan.p21 (Maciej Preś), CC BY-SA 4.0. Beyond the science, the site has become an unlikely cultural venue. The Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre opened in April 2011, with a Planet Pavilion, Space Pavilion, a cafe with a view of the Lovell dish and a 35-acre arboretum holding the UK's national collections of crab apple Ma...

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Image: Stefan.p21 (Maciej Preś) | CC BY-SA 4.0