Jodrell
Bank - Part II
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The Observatory had sited
itself, cuckoo like, on University property that up till then
had been the Botany Department's preserve. The largest part of
the site, now expanded through grants and the generosity of the
Granada Foundation, is taken up by their Arboretum.
....
A head of Nicholas Copernicus,
a founding father if not the 'patron saint' of Astronomy, is mounted
on a granite plinth outside the visitors centre. The oversized
'Belisha Beacon' stands at the entrance to the Arboretum and represents
the Sun of our Solar System.
The 'planets' are then located
in various positions throughout the Arboretum in relation to their
distance from the Sun. My Astronomy is quite shaky, so I'm only
fairly certain this is Neptune as there was no identifying plaque
nearby.
Here is the plaque for Pluto,
sited at the farthest extremity of the 35 acre site. Mars, Venus
and Earth were but a few strides away from the Sun.
The Granada Arboretum contains
two National Collections of trees, namely those of Malus (crab-apples)
and Sorbus (mountain ash and whitebeam). Here a Sorbus
is still in flower but all the Malus seemed to have finished
flowering.
Even amongst the trees in
the Arboretum it was not possible to escape completely the dominance
of the giant structure.
....
....
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But if you looked closely
there were beautiful and colourful objects to admire on a much
smaller scale.
There are other telescope
dishes on site and off-site as far away as Cambridge, linked together
in the MERLIN project.
Here, in an off-site shot
glimpsed through trees from the main road, is the Lovell Radio
Telescope - the renovated Mark IA - and the newer Mark II of 1964.
The Lovell Telescope in
its parked position looking directly up at the sky. The final
shot in the sequence and we are back, as we were at the beginning,
looking at 'Jodrell Bank' across the Cheshire fields.
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