Jodrell Bank is a radio telescope in the North of England (also featured in 2005’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie). Actually, there is one big dish (the Lovell telescope) and a few smaller ones. Which of course leads us to MRI. Of course? Of course. But more on that in a minute.

Okay, now that you’ve seen the awe-inspiring pictures, I get to explain how this all relates to MRI! Because once you’ve spent six years doing a PhD, you start to see it everywhere.

Radio waves are at the long-wavelength end of the electromagnetic spectrum (centimetres to tens of kilometres) and so you need to capture signal over an area that will take in those wavelengths. One option is to just build a dish with a really big area, such as this one in Arecibo which is 300 m. The Lovell telescope, at 76 m, is big enough…