Kenneth I. Kellermann - Open Skies: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Its Impact on US Radio Astronomy

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Cover Caption: NRAOs Very Large Array, located on the Plains of San Agustin, 50 miles east of Socorro, New Mexico. The NRAO is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by AUI. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF.

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I know Ken Kellermann, well. We both did our PhDs in radio astronomy in the 1960s, supervised by the famous radio astronomer John Bolton. Ken got his lessons on how to build a telescope and do research when John was building the Owens Valley Observatory at Caltech while I started building the interferometer at Parkes when John and Ken moved from Caltech to Australia. Many years later I spent a challenging but rewarding 7 years working for NRAO as the first director of the newly completed VLA radio telescope in New Mexico. This was sandwiched between my time at Westerbork and the Australia Telescope. To Ellen Bouton, we owe a great debt for the legacy of NRAOs extensive archives of historical material which underpin the impressively detailed source material used in this book. Sierra Brandts background as a historian of twentieth-century science nicely complements the contributions of the other two authors.

While this book is very clearly focused on the development of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), it touches on many more broader issues, including the birth of a national facility, the open access policy for scientific research, the wider societal implications of searching for extraterrestrial intelligent life, and lessons learned from major construction projects. It is far more than just the history of NRAO. By discussing the development of NRAO in an international context the authors have also written a history of the development of radio astronomy as seen from a US perspective. They start from the well-covered ground when Karl Jansky of the Bell Telephone Laboratory discovered radio emission from the Milky Way in 1933, through the somewhat idiosyncratic but innovative experiments over the next decade by one individual, Grote Reber, to the major technology developments during World War II.