Joseph Pawsey
Joseph Pawsey was a founding father of radio astronomy. During WWII, he worked on developing advanced radar instrumentation in Australia at its Radiophysics Laboratory. After the War, the discoveries of radio waves coming from the Sun inspired him to turn post-War instrumentation upwards. He and his team used innovative methods for increasing the resolution of these antennas, including using a cliff-based antenna and its reflection in the sea as a two-element interferometer. Pawsey discovered that sunspots are the sources of non-thermal radio waves from the Sun, and he and his team made a catalog of radio stars, which we now know as radio galaxies. He was appointed Director of NRAO in 1962 but died of a brain tumor before he could take the position.
