Physics World
Places · Observatory
Jodrell Bank — the Lovell Telescope
Tracked Sputnik's carrier rocket weeks after it was finished, and is now a World Heritage Site and the headquarters of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory.
- Where
- Cheshire, United Kingdom
- Coordinates
- 53.24°N 2.31°W
- Since
- 1957
- On the map
- Show me
The sky from here
The sky over this spot is zone 7 — urban, Bortle 7–8, with a naked-eye limit around magnitude 4.2–5.0. The whole sky is greyish. Stars beyond the fourth magnitude are gone, and the Pleiades are a smudge if they show at all.
Against that sky 28 of the 110 Messier objects are straightforward in 10×50 binoculars and 30 in a 130mm, with 9 reachable by eye alone. The nearest sky of Bortle 2 or better lies about 125 km north-west of here.
Between 15 May and 28 July the Sun never gets eighteen degrees below the horizon from this latitude, so there is no astronomical darkness at all for those 75 nights. Nothing faint is observable in that window, however far you drive from the nearest town.
The galactic centre tops out at 8° from this latitude — low enough that the busiest part of the Milky Way is always behind the most atmosphere, which is what separates this sky from a southern one. Of the 110 Messier objects, 22 never set from here and every one of them rises at some point in the year.
The sky here is kindest to Spindle Galaxy, Whirlpool Galaxy and Sunflower Galaxy, each of which passes within a few degrees of overhead — an object at the zenith is being seen through the least air it will ever be seen through, and the difference against the same object low in the south is not subtle.
Pinwheel Galaxy, Little Dumbbell and Owl Nebula never set from this latitude, so they are available on any clear night of the year rather than for one season of it.
Read at 53.24°N 2.31°W. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
In the news
Nearby
Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Jodrell Bank?
Everything south of declination −37°. From 53.2°N that is a cap 53° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 20% of the whole celestial sphere. Nothing about the calendar or the aperture changes that — the cap is below the horizon at every hour of every night. Its mirror image, the same 20% around the north celestial pole, is circumpolar here and never goes down.
How many hours of true darkness does Jodrell Bank get?
It runs the full range: about 12 hours 8 minutes at best, near 21 December, and flatly zero at the other end of the year around 15 May, when the Sun stays too shallow all night for the sky to finish getting dark. The measure is astronomical darkness — the Sun a full eighteen degrees under — not simply the hours between sunset and sunrise.
When is the Milky Way best from Jodrell Bank?
Late August, as a practical matter — not June, when it is highest. The galactic centre crosses the meridian at local midnight around 17 June everywhere on Earth, and from 53.2°N that date falls inside the stretch of summer when the sky never finishes getting dark. The core is therefore at its best in precisely the weeks it cannot be seen. By late August it is still up in the evening and the nights have come back, and that overlap is the whole northern season for it.
How far is Jodrell Bank from the other sites on this map?
The nearest is Bannau Brycheiniog Dark Sky Reserve, about 169 km to the south-west. The nearest other observatory is Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope, 698 km to the east. Measured as the great circle between coordinates, which is the shortest path across the surface and rarely the one you could travel.