The Ohio State University Radio Observatory was a Kraus-type radio telescope located on the grounds of the Perkins Observatory at Ohio Wesleyan University from 1963 to 1998. Known as "Big Ear", the observatory was part of The Ohio State University's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. Construction of the Big Ear began in 1956 and was completed in 1961, and it was finally turned on for the first time in 1963.
The observatory completed the Ohio Sky Survey in 1971, and from 1973–1995, Big Ear was used to search for extraterrestrial radio signals, making it the longest running SETI project in history. In 1977, the Big Ear received the noted Wow! signal. The observatory was disassembled in 1998 when developers purchased the site from the university and used the land to expand a nearby golf course. The design of the observatory is named after American physicist John D. Kraus (1910–2004), and is also used as the basis for the Nançay Radio Telescope.
Read more about Ohio State University Radio Observatory: Big Ear, Surveys, Cultural References
Famous quotes containing the words ohio, state, university, radio and/or observatory:
“Heaven is not one of your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The truth is, the whole administration under Roosevelt was demoralized by the system of dealing directly with subordinates. It was obviated in the State Department and the War Department under [Secretary of State Elihu] Root and me [Taft was the Secretary of War], because we simply ignored the interference and went on as we chose.... The subordinates gained nothing by his assumption of authority, but it was not so in the other departments.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“If not us, who? If not now, when?”
—Slogan by Czech university students in Prague, November 1989. quoted in Observer (London, Nov. 26, 1989)
“England has the most sordid literary scene I’ve ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy’s writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They’re all scratching each other’s backs.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)