DIVISION X: RADIO ASTRONOMY

Commission 40 members were saddened by the death of Grote Reber on December 20, 2002, just a few days before his 91st birthday.
Following  Karl Jansky’s 1932 detection of cosmic radio waves, Reber, working alone, and with his own resources, built and operated
the world's first radio telescope in his backyard in Wheaton, Illinois. After several years of  laborious design and construction of novel
instrumentation followed by lengthy observations, he made the first radio map of the Milky Way, detected the first discrete radio sources
as well as the intense radio emission from the Sun, Reber’s pioneering work opened a new window on the universe which later would lead
to the detection of powerful radio galaxies, quasars, pulsars, cosmic masers, giant molecular clouds, gravitational lensing and gravitational
 radiation, the first extra-solar planetary system, and the cosmic microwave background. Throughout his career, Reber worked alone
designing and building his own antennas and receivers as well the test equipment needed to work at previously unexplored wavelengths.
He was driven by an intense curiosity which, combined with his experimental skills and uncanny insight, first demonstrated the power
and importance of radio astronomy.

Text kindly supplied by Ken Kellerman.