sigh... we loose yet another great guy....


ed sharpe archivist for smecc
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wirt Atmar" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2002 11:03 PM
Subject: [HP3000-L] A death in the family


> 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
>
>
> =======================================
>
> 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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