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Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory

Astronomical observatories in MassachusettsRadio telescopesUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst buildings

The Five College Radio Astronomical Observatory (FCRAO) was a radio astronomy observatory located on a peninsula in the Quabbin Reservoir. It was sited in the town of New Salem, Massachusetts on land that was originally part of Prescott, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1969 by the Five College Astronomy Department (University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass), Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College and Smith College). From its inception, the observatory has emphasized research, the development of technology and the training of students—both graduate and undergraduate. The initial FCRAO telescope was a customized low-frequency antenna to search for pulsars in the galaxy. The development of instrumentation within the FCRAO labs contributed to the discovery of the binary pulsar system PSR B1913+16 by Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse, for which they received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics. It was replaced by a 14-meter radome-enclosed millimeter-wave telescope in 1976.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory
Prescott Greenwich Road,

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N 42.391925 ° E -72.344097 °
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Prescott Greenwich Road

Prescott Greenwich Road

Massachusetts, United States
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Prescott, Massachusetts
Prescott, Massachusetts

Prescott was a town in Hampshire County, Massachusetts. It was incorporated in 1822 from portions of Pelham and New Salem, and was partially built on Equivalent Lands. It was named in honor of Colonel William Prescott, who commanded the American forces at the Battle of Bunker Hill. It was disincorporated on April 28, 1938, as part of the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir. It was the least populous of the four unincorporated towns, with barely 300 residents by 1900. Upon dissolution, portions of the town were annexed to the adjacent towns of New Salem and Petersham. The majority of the former town (the New Salem portion) is still above water, and is known as the Prescott Peninsula. The public is not allowed on the peninsula except for an annual tour given by the Swift River Valley Historical Society, or for hikes conducted by the Society. None of the land is in Hampshire County any longer; the New Salem portion is in Franklin County; and the Petersham portion is in Worcester County. As with the nearby town of Dana, after the dissolution of incorporation, houses were moved or razed, but cellar holes remained. The Prescott First Congregational Church, located in the village of Prescott Four Corners, was moved to South Hadley and is now the home of the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum. The former site of Prescott Center was home to the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory from 1969 to 2011. Scientific work conducted on the 14-meter radio telescope will be continued on the modern 50-meter Large Millimeter Telescope in Mexico. Daniel Shays, leader of the 1787 rebellion which bears his name, was a resident of that part of Pelham which later became the southern part of Prescott. The site of his former home is still above water; but the house was gone by 1927, and in any event the site is inaccessible to the general public. The Conkey Tavern, located roughly to the west of the Shays site, was where the Shays Rebellion was largely planned. Its site is now under water. The Atkinson Tavern, once the centerpiece of the small village of Atkinson Hollow, stands today, renovated and expanded, in West Springfield, Massachusetts as the Storrowton Tavern, on the grounds owned by the Eastern States Exposition. The former Town Hall, once located just south of Atkinson Hollow, is inaccessible to the general public, and stands today off of Route 32 in Petersham. The village of North Prescott, on the border between Prescott and New Salem, remains partially open to public access. Although the site of the North Prescott Methodist Episcopal Church is vacant, the former parsonage—now a private home which is not open to the public—remains on its original site. The church building itself is today home of the Swift River Valley Historical Society in North New Salem, where it was moved in 1985. Prior to this the church stood at its site on the New Salem line until 1949, when it was initially moved to Orange as home of the former Prescott Historical Society. A few other structures remain. Prescott House, an on-campus living facility at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, is named after the former town.

Pelham Town Hall Historic District
Pelham Town Hall Historic District

The Pelham Town Hall Historic District encompasses the remaining municipal portion of the center of Pelham, Massachusetts as laid out between 1738 and 1743. It includes the Old Town Hall, built in 1743, which is claimed by the town to be the oldest continuously used town hall in the United States. It also includes the 1843 Greek Revival Congregational church, and the town's first cemetery, founded in 1739. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.The land which became Pelham was acquired by the Lisburn Proprietors, Scotch-Irish emigrants, in 1738. The next year, a lot of 10 acres (4.0 ha) was laid out for a meeting house, town pound, training field, and cemetery. The meeting house (now the town hall) was built on this parcel in 1743. Initially used for both religious and civic purposes, its religious function ended after the state mandated the separation of church and state in 1833. The Greek Revival church was built next door in 1839; it now houses the local historical society. The town center is historically significant as the last organized encampment site of rebel forces led by Daniel Shays during the Shays' Rebellion.The town hall is a two-story wood-frame structure, with a gabled roof and clapboarded exterior. Its main facade is five bays wide, with a projecting central square vestibule. The church is a single-story frame structure, with its gabled roof oriented perpendicular to that of the town hall. It has corner pilasters, which rise to an entablature, and it is topped by a single-stage square belfry with octagonal spire.

WFCR

WFCR (88.5 FM) is a non-commercial radio station licensed to Amherst, Massachusetts. It serves as the National Public Radio (NPR) member station for Western Massachusetts, including Springfield. The station operates at 13,000 watts ERP from a transmitter on Mount Lincoln in Pelham, Massachusetts, 968 feet (295 meters) above average terrain. The University of Massachusetts Amherst holds the license. The station airs NPR news programs during the morning and afternoon drive times and in the early evening. Middays and overnights are devoted to classical music and jazz is heard during the later evening hours. WFCR's broadcasting range extends to Western and Central Massachusetts, Northern Connecticut (including Hartford) as well as parts of Southern Vermont and Southern New Hampshire. WFCR's studios for most of its history were located at Hampshire House on the UMass campus. However, in 2013, the station moved most of its operations to the Fuller Building in downtown Springfield.The station signed on May 6, 1961, as a simulcast of WGBH-FM in Boston. By 1962, it had severed the electronic umbilical cord with WGBH-FM, and by 1964 it had expanded its local programming to 17 hours per day. The call letters originally represented "Four College Radio", becoming "Five College Radio" in 1966. It is a charter member of NPR, and was one of the stations that carried the initial broadcast of NPR's All Things Considered.While UMass has held the license since 1967, when it was acquired from the WGBH Educational Foundation, WFCR has always received funding from the Five Colleges (UMass Amherst, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College and Hampshire College) as well as from fund drives conducted periodically over the air. Since 2011, WFCR and sister station 640 AM WNNZ have called themselves New England Public Radio.WFCR claims the distinction of being the first radio station in Western Massachusetts to transmit a signal using iBiquity's HD Radio system. It airs two digital streams. The first is a simulcast of the analog signal, the second is a 24-hour classical music station.On April 11, 2019, WFCR announced that it would consolidate operations with WGBH-owned PBS station WGBY-TV (channel 57) under the New England Public Media banner, effective in July. UMass will retain the WFCR license, and the New England Public Radio Foundation will retain the licenses to WNNZ and its satellites; NEPM will operate the stations under program service operating agreements.