Canadian radio astronomy started directly after the Second World War.

Arthur Covington, a scientist with the National Research Council, worked on radar development during the war and when peace came, he and his colleagues made Canada's first radio telescope out of spare radar bits and pieces.

The radio telescope had a small antenna and the only radio source our pioneers could detect was the Sun. However, the instrument could do no more than register an increase in the signal power being received when the antenna was pointed at the Sun.

It just measured the total amount of radio power coming from a patch of sky 10 or more times the diameter of the Sun. There was no way the instrument was capable of making a usable solar image.

That was a problem. Optical astronomers had long established most solar activity was concentrated in areas known appropriately as active regions, which contain sunspots and the other structures associated with solar activity. The pioneer radio........

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