The
Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope was the premier radio facility in the 70-ies, but it continued to provide the highest quality data and images (in terms of calibration and dynamic rage) till the end of its operations in 2022. The last few years the research with the WSRT focused on wide-area surveys of the radio sky with arcsecond resolution, and searches for mysterious radio flashes with duration of just a few milliseconds, called
Fast Radio Bursts. Today, a single dish is still used for monitoring of peculiar FRBs that occasionally repeat, and this dish is also part of a European (in name, but otherwise quite global) network of radio telescopes, the
EVN.
We were at the Westerbork site to make a star trail there early in the evening. We also considered shooting C/2022 E3 (ZTF), but we didn't manage to get a great result the day before so we abandoned that. We started at around 7pm and we knew we didn't have much time before the moonrise, therefore we just planned a 2h-session. What we didn't expect was that the Moon would actually rise right behind the telescopes from where we were. Well, the telescope is an East-West array, so this was not completely unexpected, but we were not quite prepared for the scenery! We immediately switched from the Sony 14mm f1.8 lens to the Sony FE 100-400mm. The final image shown here was made at 400mm, and from a bit different angle than the rest. It was made with 6s exposure time at f10, ISO640, while the Moon was separately shot with 1/100s and was masked in. The star trails at 14mm (240x30s, f5.6, ISO640) and the 100mm (6s, f8, ISO640) versions of the scene are shown in the original submission and revision B.
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