Giant Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell Bank to become space light show

Image source, Bluedot

The largest radio telescope in the UK is being turned into a show.

The giant radio telescope will be in the spotlight for the first time in 2019.

Images from space will be beamed onto the dish.

Prof Teresa Anderson said that the dish would be used as a huge film screen.

The director of the Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre said that they would project on the latest data from the Sun and the Moon.

Prof Anderson and her husband, the physicist Prof Tim O'Brien, co-founded the festival and have created an accompanying soundtrack using recordings from space.

Sky's Eye View is a show they created.

The time-lapse sequence is included.

• the surface and atmosphere of the Sun, taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
• images of Earth from Nasa's Blue Marble Next Generation satellite data
• near and far sides' pictures of the Moon

The radio telescope's own scans of the Milky Way are included in the soundtrack.

Prof O'Brien said it was the Milky Way. As the telescope scans past them, you hear the sounds of individual spirals rising and falling.

There was a recording of a spinning star. He said that the beams of radio waves spin around and flash in the sky.

William Lawes' Sunrise was written in the 1600s and was inspired by Prof Anderson's work.

When Manchester physicist Sir Bernard Lovell designed and built the giant telescope, he didn't know that it would one day be used to study super massive black holes in other galaxies.

It made history by being the first to track the rocket that carried Sputnik 1. The space race was started by the Soviet breakthrough.

Prof Anderson believes Sir Bernard was a stickler for science. He was passionate about science and music. I believe we're following in his footsteps.

You can follow Victoria on social networking sites.