APOD: 2020 May 2 - Radio, The Big Ear, and the WOW Signal

Good afternoon, Rallypoint. Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is titled "Radio, The Big Ear, and the WOW Signal." SGT (Join to see) may be familiar with the The Big Ear Radio Telescope at Ohio State University, but it was a lesson for me today. A radio telescope is a specialized antenna and receiver used to receive radio waves (a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum) from astronomical sources. The former Ohio State University Radio Observatory (OSURO), aka The Big Ear, was first turned on in 1963. Big Ear covered an area larger than three football fields and relied on the Earth's rotation to help scan the sky. It detected the WOW Signal in August 1977 (it's worth reading some of the contemporary articles about this). Twenty-two years ago (May 1998), the Big Ear was turned off for good and dismantled. Its follow-on four years later (in 2002), the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in Green Bank, West Virginia, is currently the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the United States.