Ken Wilson from Mechanicsville, Virginia
Grote Reber was a Chicago-area engineer and ham radio operator who sought, unsuccessfully, to land a job with Karl Jansky after the pioneering radio astronomer’s discovery of radio emission from the Milky Way. In 1937, Reber decided to build his own radio telescope. He used the resulting 9.6-meter dish to confirm Jansky’s discovery and published radio-sky surveys in the following years. In the early 1960s, he donated the telescope to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, where it sits now as a historic monument. This shot is a 14-second exposure taken with a Canon DSLR at ISO 3200 and a 14mm lens at f/4.