Grote Reber in 1975
A radio astronomy pioneer, Grote Reber was inspired by Karl Jansky’s discovery of radio waves coming from the center of our Galaxy in the 1930s. Reber was only in his twenties when he built a 31-foot dish antenna in his backyard in Wheaton, Illinois. With it, he mapped the sky in radio waves, giving more detail to Jansky’s detections, while also discovering more radio sources in space. Reber moved to Hawaii and later Tasmania to build antennas to pick up the hard-to-detect long wavelength radio waves coming from the Universe. He died in 2002.
Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF
