Westerbork Radio Telescope
The Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands is: an aperture synthesis interferometer that consists of a linear array of 14 antennas arranged on a 2.7 km East-West line. Um… So, aperture synthesis is when a collection of telescopes are banded together to achieve the same “resolving power” as an instrument the size of the entire collection. And an ‘interferometer’ is, ah… best explained on the Interferometry Wikipedia page! There’s 12 antennas right next to each other, the easternmost of which can be moved on rail tracks, and a little further to the east are two further antennas,…