NRAO 300-foot Telescope

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In the early days of the NRAO, the late 1950s, eager American radio astronomers wanted a giant radio telescope to call their own. In the design stages was a most ambitious plan for the world’s largest equatorially-mounted telescope, a 140-foot monster dish. However, its never-before-attempted engineering would take some time…a little too much time, and anxious astronomers sought a “quick and dirty” big telescope to span the wait.

Largest Transit Telescope
In offices still new-smelling from the NRAO’s inauguration, radio astronomers and contracted engineers discussed plans for a 300-foot transit telescope, a behemoth that could observe the sky turning overhead. Engineer E. R. Faelten of Buffalo, New York took the designs to fabricators for proposals on building the new telescope.

In April 1961, the Bristol Steel and Iron Works, Inc. was awarded the contract, and we enjoyed a groundbreaking ceremony with them on April 27, 1961. By August 30, 1962, they had completed the construction of what became the world’s largest radio telescope from designs that had left desks less than two years before.



NRAO operates a widely dispersed set of facilities. The original site at Green Bank included the 300-foot transit telescope (below) from 1962 until its collapse in 1988 (heralded as a hostile action by space aliens in one tabloid headline thoughtfully passed along by a colleague). This was also the home of the original 85-foot dish, later joined by two more to form the Green Bank Interferometer (which served, among other things, as a testbed for techniques used in the VLA, and later for astrometric and monitoring programs). The Green Bank site can be seen in this satellite photograph from Google Maps.

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