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I think that the event which, more than anything else, led me to the search for ways of making more powerful radio telescopes, was the recognition, in 1952, that the intense source in the constellation of Cygnus was a distant galaxy—1000 million light years away. This discovery showed that some galaxies were capable of producing radio emission about a million times more intense than that from our own Galaxy or the Andromeda nebula, and the mechanisms responsible were quite unknown. ... [T]he pos
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I follow the road south in darkness, the slight ocean breeze cool and refreshing, the moon on my left, the muted roar of the Benguela Current to my right; dead ahead, the Southern Cross hangs lopsided in a sky the colour of Indian ink. The stars tonight are extraordinarily clear; the Bushman call the Milky Way 'The Backbone of the Night'. An aeroplane in the night sky floats past, a lonely firefly exiled to outer space because of its abnormal size.
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― Traversa
― Traversa
