Telescopes around the world

When I was working at the Leiden Observatory I've visited several institues around the world with telescope sites. At the moment I have photo's of them from the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States. Most of them are radio telescopes, because that was my main work.

From some telescopes in Cambridge I don't know the history, so if you know more about is (which survey at which frequency) let me know.

Image of the Dwingeloo telescope Dwingeloo radio telescope. This was more or less what I saw when looking out the window from my office for about 7 months. This was the first major radio telescope in the Netherlands.
Image of the Westerbork telescope Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope. The telescope that made so many discoveries and put mostly Dutch astronomers in the front of radio astronomy. When I was working on the WENSS project I worked with data from this telescope.
Image of the old Leiden Observatory The old Leiden Observatory - optical refractor. The telescope has a 340 mm opening and a focal length of 524 cm. Since it is used as a photograpic instrument (using a plate cassette to hold glass plates of about 15x15 cm coated with emulsion) a second optical viewer (200 mm opening) is placed in parallel. It was build in 1897 and I was together with Erwin the last student who officially had to make exposures as part of our studies. Now it is maintaned by the WLS.
Image of the VLA telescope One of the 27 radio telescopes from the VLA in New Mexico. I used data from this telescope for my Master Degree. I also went to the VLA for a summerschool. This array of telescopes can been seen in the movie "Contact".
Image of a Cambridge optical telescope Cambridge optical telescope at IOA.
Image of the Cambridge radio telescopes Cambridge radio telescopes. On the left you see one of the Synthesis Telescopes, similar to the WSRT at Westerbork, on the right you'll see an array used for a radio survey.
Image of the Cambridge radio telescopes Cambridge radio telescopes used for the 8C survey. The 8C survey covers the northern hemisphere above a declination of 60d, at 38 MHz, with a resolution of 4.5×4.5 cosec(declination) arcmin2 (EW×NS).
Image of the Cambridge Merlin telescope Cambridge Merlin telescope. Merlin is a VLBI network operated by the Jodrell Bank Observatory.


This document was last updated on 08/08/01