The Cosmic Noise Expedition to New Mealand 1948 by John Bolton and Gordon Stanley: the identification of the radio source Taurus A with teh Crab Nebula.

Miller Goss(NRAO) and Claire Hooker (Sydney U.)

John Bolton and Gordon Stanley discovered a weak radio source in late 1947 using a sea-cliff interfermoeter at Dover Heights, Sydney Australia. The positional error was many degrees. In June to August 1948 they went to New Zealand, transporting the 100 MHz radio telescope. For the first time a west facing cliff was used to refine the coordinates. The identification of the sources Taurus A with the Crab, Virgo A with M87 and Cen A with NGC 5128 were the exciting results of this campaign, published in Nature in mid 1949. The importance of this result was immediately reconginzed by Jan Oort and Rudolf Minkowski. I have visited the two sites in NZ (both east and west coast of the North Island) in the last few weeks and met Peter Greenwood who visited the Australian group when he was 8 years old.