The Big Ear
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Big Ear was a radio telescope located on the grounds of the Ohio Wesleyan University's The Perkins Observatory from the 1960s to 1998 when it was disassembled. It was part of The Ohio State University's SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project. The design of Big Ear is known as Kraus-type, after Dr. John D. Kraus (1910-2004), and is also used at the Nançay Radio Telescope.
The Big Ear completed the first radio map of the night sky in the early 1970s. On August 15, 1977, The Big Ear recorded its greatest success when an interesting radio signal was received from the portion of the sky that the telescope was aimed at. This event, chronicled in text books and well known in astrological circles, is known as "The WOW!" signal, so named for the notation made by a volunteer at the site on the date of the event. No other such signal was recorded.
The Big Ear was noted in the 1995 Guinness Book of World Records as being the longest operating Radio Telescope involved with the SETI project to that date.
The radio telescope was disassembled in 1998 when developers who had purchased the site from Ohio Wesleyan University began construction of an expansion of a golf course next to the site.
External links
- The Big Ear Memorial Site (http://www.bigear.org/)
- Big Ear Inventor John Kraus Dies (http://www.allscienctnews.net/news.html?view=9978)
