jansky

He improved upon Jansky’s antenna — a bunch of metal tubes held up by a pivoting wooden trestle — and fashioned a parabolic metal dish for focusing incoming radio waves to a point, where an amplifier boosted the feeble signal.

Jansky’s discovery was mostly met with mild curiosity by the astronomy community.

In fact, the very first radio astronomy experiment can be traced back before Jansky to August of 1924, when Mars made its closest pass to Earth in nearly a century.

Ironically, Jansky’s original goal — to filter out natural sources of radio waves and make way for communication technology — is now reversed for radio astronomers trying to study the universe in the age of modern electronics.

His efforts were wildly successful, reproducing Jansky’s observations and then creating the first radio map of the sky.

Later observers, for example Jansky and Moss, established four groups.