Jodrell Bank Observatory
— — a white dish listening to the far edge of the universe.
Not only on a wall.
“The Lovell Telescope, seventy-six metres across, has been listening to the sky from a field in Cheshire since 1957. It tracked Sputnik on its first night of operation and the University of Manchester has been pointing it at quasars, pulsars and the cosmic microwave background ever since. UNESCO added the site to the World Heritage list in 2019. The Discovery Centre at its base is open most days of the year.
Jodrell Bank Observatory, on ceramic.
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The place, in three passes.
Jodrell Bank Observatory sits on a flat agricultural site near the village of Lower Withington in Cheshire, England, about thirty kilometres south of Manchester. It is operated by the University of Manchester's Department of Physics and Astronomy and has been a working radio observatory since 1945. The Lovell Telescope, completed in 1957 under the direction of Sir Bernard Lovell, was the largest steerable dish in the world for nearly four decades and remains the third largest. UNESCO inscribed the site on the World Heritage list in 2019.
Each July the observatory hosts Bluedot, a four-day music, science and arts festival held in the shadow of the Lovell dish since 2016. Stages run between the telescope and the visitor centre, the lineup mixes headline bands with cosmology lectures, and the dish itself is sometimes used as a projection surface after dark. Outside the festival window the site is quiet and the radio campus returns to its working schedule of pulsar timing and very-long-baseline interferometry observations across the wider e-MERLIN array.
The Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre is open most days of the year and sits at the foot of the telescope, with the dish visible from the car park as you approach. There are walking paths around the perimeter, the First Light Pavilion gallery on the history of radio astronomy, and an arboretum planted in the 1970s. The site is reached by car from junction 18 of the M6 motorway, or by bus from Holmes Chapel and Macclesfield railway stations on the West Coast Main Line.