Jodrell Bank Observatory

Jodrell Bank Observatory stands in the Cheshire countryside near the villages of Goostrey and Holmes Chapel. It grew from eleven acres of farmland bought by the University of Manchester’s horticultural botany department in 1939. The site takes its name from the nearby hamlet of Jodrell Bank, once home to the Jodrell family who farmed at Jodrell Hall. Bernard Lovell moved Second World War radar equipment to the quiet fields in December 1945 to study cosmic rays. The first staff, Alf Dean and Frank Foden, watched meteors with the naked eye while Lovell recorded their radio echoes. A searchlight borrowed from the army soon helped confirm that radar echoes came from meteor trails. The observatory became a hub for major discoveries in radio astronomy. Its first large instrument, the Transit Telescope built in 1947, found radio noise from the Andromeda galaxy and the remains of Tycho’s supernova. The 250-foot Lovell Telescope followed in 1957 and tracked Sputnik 1 just days after launch. It later guided Pioneer 5, received the first pictures from the Moon’s surface before the Soviets released them, and tracked Luna 9 and Luna 15. The telescope also measured distances to the Moon and Venus, discovered millisecond pulsars, and detected the first gravitational lens. Visitors enter through the Jodrell Bank Visitor Centre in Lower Withington and walk towards the towering Lovell Telescope. An arboretum planted with labelled trees surrounds the centre, offering quiet paths between labelled species. The telescope itself dominates the landscape, its vast white dish supported by a ring of steel towers. Nearby stands the Mark II telescope, an elliptical dish used with the Lovell Telescope as part of the MERLIN network. The site lies beside the A535 and is close to Goostrey railway station on the Crewe to Manchester line.