The One Mile Telescope

This was a few weeks ago now but I headed down to Cambridge with my friend @fastchrisuk It was set to be a clear night, and as Chris had told us, there was a the One Mile Telescope sat in the corner of a field that we could easily walk into and take some photos of the night sky. Enjoying some Astro photography I jumped at the chance so we headed down..

A little history (Sourced from Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Mile_Telescope)...

The One Mile Telescope was completed by the Radio Astronomy Group of Cambridge University in 1964. The telescope was used to produce the 5C catalogue of radio sources.

Observations with larger incremental spacings were used to observe individual radio sources with unprecedented sensitivity, angular resolution, and image quality. These surveys required intensive use of inverse Fourier transforms, and were made possible by development of a new generation of computers such as the Titan.

In 1971, Sir Martin Ryle described why, in the late 1950s, radio astronomers at MRAO decided on the construction of the new One Mile telescope: "Our object was twofold. First we wanted to extend the range of our observations far back in time to the earliest days of the Universe, and this required a large increase in both sensitivity and resolution. With greater resolution we hoped that we might be able to draw radio maps of individual radio sources with sufficient detail to give some indication of the physical processes which brought them into being."

One of the One Mile Telescope dishes was temporarily used to improve the resolution of MERLIN (then MTRLI) from 1987 until Autumn 1990.

So below is a star trail shot that I took. Its a few weeks ago now but I believe this was about an hour and a half of 20 second exposures at F2.8. This is the shot that was the goal of the tip, certainly for me..

However, when we first got there the sun had just set but it was blue hour and well it was a beautiful site. I took a phone shot first with my iphone, which was good enough, but had to setup the proper camera, this is what I got, and this is now an A2 frame in my home office on the wall..

Being lightpainters too we couldn't miss the opportunity to take something a little out of this world, so our first setup before the star trails was a backlit silhouette, with a large beam facing up, simple but oh so effective..

By the time we were finishing up and thinking of getting a coffee for the way home, I had to stop and get one more shot. This is a straight image and I love it for its simplicity. It might have been a 20-30 second exposure, I honestly can't remember but the orange of the foreground and the blue of the sky, I imagined this being shot in some Arizona desert rather than a field in Cambridge..

I do hope you've liked these shots, I try to vary what I shoot from portrait and fashion work, to street style, to astro and to lightpainting. Hopefully this shows in my work.
Thank you very much for taking the time to look at this..