Guess the object

The mystery object in Issue 91 proved a little too out-of-this-world, although some entertaining guesses were sent through.

Luke Marsh wondered if “the gold machine is some sort of device for measuring waves or used in navigation on boats”, which was a bit more on-track than his other suggestion – the shell of a Dalek from Doctor Who.

The object was indeed placed onto a vessel, though it wasn’t looking at the salty kind of waves.

A closer answer came from Matthew Hunt, who intuited that it was used to study electromagnetic radiation: “This wouldn’t be an electron microscope, would it?”

Closer again was Paul van Leeuwen. “I think it might be Mr Hale and Mr Bopp with their telescope discovering Comet Halebopp,” he wrote.

This gold-plated device was a telescope, but not a typical one. Built by George Carruthers and William Conway, it was an ultraviolet spectrograph that became the first Moon-based observatory, used by Apollo 16 astronauts to photograph star clouds, nebulae and Earth’s outermost atmosphere in 1972. It still stands upon the Descartes highland region today.