ALGONQUIN RADIO OBSERVATORY - OBSERVATOIRE ALGONQUIN DE RADIOASTRONOMIE

This radio astronomy observatory has the largest satellite dish in Canada, no less. It is located in the wilderness, just a few hundred metres from the southern shores of Lake Travers, in the heart of Algonquin Provincial Park. It was created by the National Research Council of Canada to help Canadian radio astronomers looking for a quality site to conduct their research. It was inaugurated in 1959, and its first director, Arthur Edwin Covington, was also Canada's first radio astronomer. He had worked extensively since the mid-1940s on the flow of electrical energy produced by the Sun, and had demonstrated that the intensity of the Sun's radiation was directly related to its magnetic activity. In 1966, 32 parabolic antennas, each 3 m in diameter, were installed on the site, with the goal of improving the accuracy of measurements taken on the Sun. Covington had previously initiated the project for the construction of a large dish of 46 m diameter, which was completed in the same year. At that time, it became one of the most sensitive radio astronomical antennas in the world. During the 1970s, national and international collaborations intensified, and in 1990 the results obtained at the observatory were permanently centralized by the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, British Columbia.