Dwight Peck's personal Web site
Mr Peck views one of the places from which daughter Alison views the universe
Summer hols 2001 have come and gone. Mr Peck's number 3 daughter Marlowe comes to Europe anyway, and we sojourn northwards to Bonn, Germany, to number 1 daughter Alison's place of work -- the Max Planck Institut für Radio-Astronomie in Bonn and, much more fun, the largest single steerable radio telescope in the world, at nearby Effelsberg.
Whooaa. Mighty Big. A football field across, and since it doesn't work in optical wavelengths, you can disco all night in nearby cities and nobody cares. Your cell telephone, however, well, if you dally too long in the Bonn vicinity talking to your former girlfriend, that might begin to look like a newly-discovered quasar.
Let's climb up in there and have a look-see.
Up in the dish, near the top-level control room, we find (from left) Marlowe Peck squinting and losing her shirt; our splendid astronomer guide, Alex (white hardhat); Alison's Tim Canty; and Alison herownself.
Young Marlowe Peck HATES being photographed, especially when wearing hardhats 200 meters off the ground in the dish of a large radio telescope in Germany.
Back on the ground, Marlowe, Alison, and Tim Canty (atmospheric physics doctoral student visiting from New Mexico Tech) lounge about near the telescope control centres.
Four dishes. One for astronomers, three for staff. Just imagine the TV channels you could get on that big one.
Dad and Alison posing for a countryside photo in the Effelsberg region of Germany, with the sneaky radio telescope, like Ashcroft, watching over them.
Following all which, Marlowe and her Papa returned to Switzerland for some rainy hiking, and months later Alison came down to hike about a bit as well. Here.
Update 2002: Alison has moseyed off from Bonn, Germany, and now works at Harvard University's radio telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii in the Sub-Millimeter Array project of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics-- from which, hopefully, photos will emanate soon. In optical wavelengths, of course. Tim Canty has completed his PhD and is now working at Lawrence Livermore national labs, I think.
Update 2007: Alison has moseyed off to Santiago, Chile, to be Deputy Project Scientist at the European Southern Observatory's ALMA (Atacama Large Millimetre Array) telescope, now under construction.
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All rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Posted 24 December 2001, revised 28 May
2008.
