Grote Reber died a few days ago. He has long been one of my heroes, someone
who was so committed to an idea that he invested almost all of his wealth and
his life to it, an idea that almost all of professional astronomy was either
diffident to or completely unware of at the time. He is an example of someone
who "changed the world" through sheer perserverance, intelligence, and the
capacity to see the world in a way that only one other person had seen it.

Reber built the first radio telescope in his backyard, funding the entire
project himself. But even more importantly, Reber understood almost
immediately what he was listening to -- and that his instrument was acting as
a bolometer, measuring the background blackbody radiation of the galaxy.

Reber, although an "amateur", was a very careful engineer and scientist. He
eventually assembled all of his findings and wrote them up in a paper which
he submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, a very prestigious journal, and
one in which it has always been exceedingly difficult to be published in.
Reber's paper was so far out in left field that it was uniformly rejected by
its reviewers, but the editor of the journal felt that it was a far greater
sin to potentially reject something of importance than publish a bad paper.
Based on that contention, the editor accepted it and his acceptance changed
the face of astronomy forever.

The following notice is from today's NY Times.

Wirt Atmar


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Grote Reber, 90; Built First Radio Telescope for Astronomy

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

Grote Reber, a pioneering radio astronomer who built the first substantial
radio telescope dedicated to astronomy and put it in his backyard in Wheaton,
Ill., died on Friday in Tasmania, Australia, his home for some 50 years. He
was 90.

Mr. Reber was an engineering student in 1931 when Karl Jansky of Bell
Telephone Laboratories, using a large antenna system, made his famous
discovery of cosmic radio waves emanating from beyond the solar system.

Mr. Jansky's results received little attention from other scientists at the
time, but Mr. Reber, who was also a ham radio operator, set out to determine
whether the waves were coming only from the galaxy or from other celestial
objects.

In 1937, using about a half-year's worth of salary he had saved from jobs at
various radio manufacturers, Mr. Reber erected his telescope.

But much like Mr. Jansky's accomplishment, Mr. Reber's invention went
relatively unnoticed, garnering the attention only of his puzzled neighbors.

"Jansky's discovery that the galaxy was giving off radio waves was considered
such a strange finding at the time that no one appreciated it or followed up
on it, except for Reber," said Dr. Woodruff Sullivan, an astronomer and a
historian of science at the University of Washington.

"The two of them were the pioneers of radio astronomy," Dr. Sullivan said.
"Before Reber, there was no radio astronomy -- just `astronomy' because
people only used optical telescopes."

Mr. Reber based his design for the telescope on a simple optical mirror, but
on a much larger scale. A curved, or parabolic, dish was used to focus a wide
range of radio frequencies. Made of sheet metal, the dish had a diameter of
31.4 feet and could focus radio waves to a point 20 feet above it.

A radio receiver that could amplify faint cosmic signals by a factor of
several million was attached to the telescope, making the waves strong enough
to be recorded and charted.

After two years of developing and testing receivers and roaming the sky with
his telescope nightly, Mr. Reber published "Cosmic Static," a series of
articles in The Astrophysical Journal that many scientists today use to mark
the birth of intentional radio astronomy.

In 1944, he created the first contour radio map of the sky, with brighter
areas indicating richer radio sources, the brightest being the center of the
Milky Way.

Mr. Reber made increasingly detailed measurements and published them over the
years in many prestigious journals, like Nature and The Journal of
Geophysical Research.

The results of his surveys helped establish radio astronomy as a major field
after World War II and his seminal radio telescope paved the way for the
landmark discoveries of quasars, pulsars and the remnant glow left over from
the Big Bang.

Mr. Reber went on to receive a number of major awards usually reserved for
professional astronomers, including the American Astronomical Society's
highest honor in 1962 and several lectureships.

Grote Reber was born in Chicago in 1911 and earned his bachelor's degree from
the Armour Institute of Technology, now the Illinois Institute of Technology.
He worked for the National Bureau of Standards in the late 1940's, before
leaving for Hawaii and, ultimately, Tasmania to study the cosmos through
holes in the layer of charged particles, or ionosphere, in the earth's
atmosphere.

Mr. Reber's original radio telescope is on display at the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory's site in Green Bank, W. Va., alongside a full-scale
replica of Mr. Jansky's antenna.

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