Site of World's First Parabolic Radio Telescope - Wheaton, IL
Posted by: 
adgorn
N 41° 52.004 W 088° 06.535
16T E 407970 N 4635574
Built in 1937 by Grote Reber in his backyard, later disassembled and moved for posterity to Greenbank, WV. The backyard site is now a parking lot, and a historical marker was added in 1999 to commemorate this first.
Waymark Code: WMJVY0
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 01/05/2014
Views: 4
Thanks to the Roadside America entry (
visit link) for bringing this to my attention.
More from wikipedia (
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"Reber Radio Telescope is a parabolic radio telescope built by astronomer Grote Reber in his back yard in Illinois in 1937, implementing an earlier proposal of Karl Jansky, the discoverer (1931) of radio waves emanating from the Milky Way. It was the second radio telescope ever built (after Jansky's dipole array), and the first parabolic radio telescope, serving as a prototype for the first large dish radio telescopes such as the Green Bank Telescope and Lovell Telescope constructed after World War 2. Made of sheet metal with a 31.4 foot (9 meter) aperture and 20 foot (6 meter) focal length, it was the largest parabolic dish in existence at the time. Reber was the world's only radio astronomer at the time, and his construction of the telescope and the sky surveys he did with it helped found the field of radio astronomy, revealing radio sources such as Cassiopeia A and Cygnus X-1 for the first time.
Reber sold the telescope to the US National Bureau of Standards and it was moved to Sterling, Virginia, then later it became the property of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and was moved to Boulder, Colorado, and finally to Green Bank, West Virginia.
It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1989." See the National Park Service's entry at (
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The entry in the National Radio Astronomy Observatory website (
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Quite impressive!
Directions: On the south side of Karlskoga Ave., midway between N. Wheaton Ave. and N. Hale St. Just south of the Memorial Park band shell and a half-block east of city hall.
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