Chilbolton crop circles

Completely unrelated to the real science we're doing at Chilbolton, but fun nonetheless...

I just found in doing some research on the Chilbolton site (most famous for being an airfield in the past, and of course for our LOFAR station in the future..) that in 2001 the site was famous nationally for some elaborate crop circles. In the picture below you can see crop 'circles' from August 2001. The lower pattern is a face, the upper one is a replica of the 'SETI' signal sent by the giant Arecibo radio dish towards the globular cluster M13 in 1974 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message for more information on this act of exploration and optimism). Now if these crop circles had appeared AFTER we completed the station, the press would have been *really* interested...

Trench Hazards

During the digging of the trenches, the folks at Chilbolton have occasionally come up with some unexpected finds. One of these was some brickwork, close to a cable exit point on the High-Band Array.



From comparing the location to some of the historical maps, they suspect it may be part of a World War II searchlight facility. The Chilbolton Observatory site was once an RAF airfield (also see this Wikipedia article on RAF Chilbolton), used during the Second World War. According to old maps, there was a searchlight installation near this position and perhaps the brickwork is part of the surrounding structure.

It was certainly extremely hard and they had great difficulty in dealing with it, but it's all taken care of now.

25m Sunset

Today here's wonderful shot of sunset behind the 25m dish at Chilbolton along with a background explanation from The Chilbolton Observatory Website.

This is the view of the Chilbolton 25m dish, as seen from the LOFAR site. The story of the Chilbolton Observatory is a tale of engineering triumph. A project that was as ambitious in its day as the Greenwich Millennium Dome, the Chilbolton Observatory was opened in 1967 amid great pomp and circumstance by the secretary of state for Education and Science. The ceremony was a celebration of a landmark project, the culmination of a two-year effort to design and construct a stunning 25 metre radar antenna that dominated the rolling Hampshire landscape for miles around. It was designed to support the research aspirations of the prestigious radio and space research station for decades to come. Today, the grand old dish stands sentinel on the horizon of the new LOFAR project.