Reber posing with his and first radio telescope. He sold his telescope to the National Bureau of Standards, and it was erected on a turntable at their field station in Sterling, Virginia. Eventually the telescope made its way to NRAO in Green Bank, West Virginia, and Reber supervised its reconstruction at that site. Grote Reber (December 22, 1911 - December 20, 2002) was a pioneer of radio astronomy. He was instrumental in investigating and extending Karl Jansky's work, and conducted the first sky survey in the radio frequencies. In the summer of 1937, he built his own radio telescope in his back yard. His first receiver operated at 3300 MHz and failed to detect signals from outer space, as did his second, operating at 900 MHz. Finally, his third attempt, at 160 MHz, was successful in 1938, confirming Jansky's discovery. He turned his attention to making a radio-frequency sky map, which he completed in 1941 and extended in 1943. He published a considerable body of work during this era, and was the initiator of the "explosion" of radio astronomy in the immediate post-WWII era. His data, published as contour maps showing the brightness of the sky in radio wavelengths, revealed the existence of radio sources such as Cygnus A and Cassiopeia A for the first time. He died in 2002, two days before his 91st birthday. Photographed in 1960 at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in West Virginia.