LOFAR-UK

The UK's LOFAR station is based at the Chilbolton Observatory in Hampshire. The first parts were delivered Autumn 2009, installation occured over the summer of 2010 and the site was opened by Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell in September 2010. The telescope was named in memory of the late Prof. Steve Rawlings who was a driving force in the original effort to build a LOFAR station in the UK.

If you are interested in using the Rawlings Array for observations, see the Call for Proposals. The remainder of this page gives a non-astronomer's overview of the stations.

Below you can see a panoramic view of the Chilbolton Station. The 25m radar can be seen in the distance.

This is an aerial shot of the Chilbolton observatory showing how it looked before any LOFAR installation - the dish you see is the 25m radar. The LOFAR station is located to the lower right of the image.

And this is an aerial shot taken from a balloon showing how things looked in July 2010 in the middle of the LOFAR installation (many thanks to Tim Freegarde (Southampton Physics) and friends for providing us with this! ).

Other nice images of Chilbolton can be found in our blog section Best Images.

Below you can find a video tour of the station.