All,
The Lovell radiotelescope at Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, is under threat in a funding cutback by the UK government. This despite the recently completed £8m optical fibre upgrade to link the Lovell with five other UK radiotelescopes to make up the MERLIN interferometric array, with a 217km aperture! http://www.merlin.ac.uk/e-merlin/

The BA has his ear close to the sky, as usual, see: http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2...-jodrell-bank/

Let's hope the Gov. see sense.

John

Here some more info on this. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3532951.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle3532952.ece It is not clear to me whether this is closure of the whole merlin project JohnD linked to.

Thanks, epenguin.

I thought nobody else cared!
But I cannot see what the writer of the TImes article on peer review is on about, referring to Jodrell Bank.

As I understand it, and I'm not an insider, JB was the hub of this virtual telescope, and the £8 million was on landlines to connect it to it's cooperators. If JB as a centre goes down, so does Merlin. A hub design may not have been ideal, when a distributed net might have avoided this problem, but I can't judge.
John

Oh well, looks like nobody else does care!

In the USA, there has been a lot of talk about shutting down Aricebo in Puerto Rico, and the sale of Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin.

There is only so much money budgeted for astronomy, and when the powers that be want to put up mew facilities, it is the old facilites that suffer.

A good example, from personal experience, is the Mount Wilson Observatory in Southern California. There is a strong emotional connection to that observatory due to its history, but the older equipment is suffering from lack of funding and use. the only thing keeping the 60 inch telescope running is by renting out out to the public for viewing. The 100 inch gathers dust. The solar telescopes there are almost out of operating funds.

The only organization there that is getting sufficient funding is the CHARA program, and rightly so, as it is doing cutting edge science in long baseline visual stellar interferometry.

Matthew Ota
ex MWO telescope operator