The Jodrell Bank Archive

2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the Lovell telescope. From this page you can explore the early history of the telescope and browse an archive of images taken during the construction in the 1950s and the first operation in 1957.

19^th March: The Blue Book, the memo written by Lovell and Husband in 1951 outlining the plans and requirements for "a 250ft aperture steerable radio telescope" (what became the Mk 1, now the Lovell telescope), hes been added to the archive.

The archive is under construction at the present time. The material is being catalogued at present and will appear here as it is digitised. In the meantime, here are two nice examples:

Left: view of the telescope with most of the major steelwork completed. Large amounts of scaffolding can still be seen under the bowl and a crane is behind the tower on the right of the image. At this point the fixing of the surface panels has begun, but still has a long way to go. Right: the view from one of the towers during the assembly of the backing structure for the bowl. Here you can see the central hub at the base of the bowl and some of the ribs which will eventually support the membrane from underneath.