I’m drawing a blank on this, but in one of the Connections 2 episodes, James Burke recounted someone who made a backyard radiotelescope with some chicken wire and made one of the first photos of “the universe” showing (cosmic background radiation?) I’m drawing a blank on the person and can’t find the exact photo, and I may be mixing up some details. I thought it might have been Penzias and Wilson, but their contraption seemed a little more high tech than what he described.
It couldn’t have been before 1964, since cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered in that year:
Probably talking about Karl Jansky, the first radio astronomer. Like Penzias and Wilson, this work was done at Bell Labs. He was not seeing the cosmic background radiation, that work came much later.
Thank you! That’s the one I’m remembering.
Ha! Found the ep on youtube. The amateur astronomer who actually made the first crude radiotelescope was Grote Reber. (And my memory was slightly off–it was just the Milky Way!)
Also, it was the 1930s, so Reber didn’t actually image the background radiation that James Burke held up for demonstration, as that would happen several decades later.