The Dwingeloo Radio Observatory is a single-dish radio telescope near the village of

Dwingeloo Dwingeloo () is a village halfway between Meppel and Assen in the Dutch province of Drenthe. It is a part of the municipality of Westerveld. The village is known internationally because of the radio telescope of the Dwingeloo Radio Observator ...

() in the northeastern

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

. Construction started in 1954, and the telescope was completed in 1956. The radio telescope has a diameter of 25 m.Monumentnummer: 530829 - radiotelescoop

Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (RCE, Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands) often abbreviated as Cultureel Erfgoed, is a Dutch heritage organisation working for the protection and conservation of National Heritage Sites. It is locate ...

. Retrieved 20 January 2016. At the time of completion it was the largest radio telescope in the world, but it was overtaken in 1957 by the

Lovell Telescope The Lovell Telescope is a radio telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Goostrey, Cheshire in the north-west of England. When construction was finished in 1957, the telescope was the largest steerable dish radio telescope in the world a ...

. As of 2000, it was no longer in operation in an official capacity. Since August 2009, the radio telescope has been a national heritage site (''

rijksmonument A rijksmonument (, ) is a national heritage site of the Netherlands, listed by the agency Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (RCE) acting for the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. At the end of February 2015, the Netherlands ...

''). The telescope dish was removed for restoration in June 2012. The " C.A. Muller Radio Astronomy Station" foundation ("CAMRAS" for short) restored the telescope to working order. The dish was remounted in November 2012. Radio amateurs along with amateur and professional astronomers, use the telescope for projects, one being Earth–Moon–Earth communication, also known as moonbounce, which allows for people on different parts of Earth to communicate via the Moon. In this technique, radio wave signals are aimed at the Moon by one location, bounce off the Moon's surface, and are detected by an antenna at a different location on Earth. The technique of "visual moonbounce", where the digital representation of an image is moonbounced at amateur-radio frequencies, has been developed at the Dwingeloo Telescope. It was later used in the art project "OPTICKS" by interdisciplinary artist Daniela de Paulis The radio telescope is owned by

ASTRON Astron may refer to: * Mitsubishi Astron engine * ASTRON, the Dutch foundation for astronomy research, operating the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope and LOFAR * Astron (comics), a fictional character, a member of the Marvel Comics group The ...

, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. The site of the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory also houses most of the staff of ASTRON and a test site for the Low Frequency Array radio telescope,

LOFAR The Low-Frequency Array, or LOFAR, is a large radio telescope, with an antenna network located mainly in the Netherlands, and spreading across 7 other European countries as of 2019. Originally designed and built by ASTRON, the Netherlands Instit ...

. Two galaxies are named after this telescope:

Dwingeloo 1 Dwingeloo 1 is a barred spiral galaxy about 10 million light-years away from the Earth, in the constellation Cassiopeia. It lies in the Zone of Avoidance and is heavily obscured by the Milky Way. The size and mass of Dwingeloo 1 are comparab ...

and

Dwingeloo 2 Dwingeloo 2 is a small irregular galaxy discovered in 1996 and located about 10 million light-years away from the Earth. Its discovery was a result of the Dwingeloo Obscured Galaxy Survey (DOGS) of the Zone of Avoidance using the Dwingeloo Radio ...

References

External links

* * {{radio-astronomy Astronomical observatories in the Netherlands Buildings and structures completed in 1956 Radio telescopes Rijksmonuments in Drenthe Westerveld