Handwritten, 2-page letter, dated 27 June 1994 by James Stanley Hey. The letter explains his delay in answering his autograph request because he and his wife have both been ill. He goes on to talk about his autobiography and asks for donations to Crossroads Care. Signed at the conclusion J. Stanley Hey in ballpoint ink. Folding crease, otherwise, nice. (1909-2000) James Stanley Hey was an English physicist and radio astronomer. With the targeted application of radar technology for astronomical research, he laid the basis for the development of radio astronomy. While working in Richmond Park during the Second World War, Hey discovered that the Sun radiates radio waves and localized for the first time an extragalactic radio source in the constellation Cygnus.In 1940 Hey joined the Air Defence Research and Development Establishment's (ADRDE) Operational Research Group, later the Army Operational Research Group (AORG) after a six-week course at the Army Radio School. Hey was based at Petersham, Surrey, and later at Ibstock Place, Roehampton, Surrey. His main research site was nearby in Richmond Park. From February 1942 Hey's task was to work on radar anti-jamming methods; for a year German jamming of Allied radar had been a problem and the escape of three German warships through the English Channel, aided by enemy radar jamming from the French coast, had highlighted the problem. On 27 and 28 February 1942, Hey had reports from sites across Britain of severe noise jamming of anti-aircraft radars in the 4–8 m range. Realising that the direction of maximum interference seemed to follow the Sun, he checked with the Royal Observatory, Greenwich and found that a very active sunspot was traversing the solar disc. He concluded that a sunspot region, which was believed to emit streams of energetic ions and electrons in magnetic fields of around 100 G (gauss), could emit meter-wave radiation. This was the first discovery of a specific astronomical radio source. Later in 1942, G.C. Southworth in the USA also linked the Sun with radio noise, this time in the centimetre-wave region.Later, in 1944–1945, Hey used radar to track the paths of V-2 rockets approaching London at about 100 miles high, aiming to be able to predict their point of impact. He noticed spasmodic transient radar echoes at heights of about 60 miles, arriving at a rate of five to 10 per hour. When the V-2 attacks ceased, the echoes did not; Hey concluded that meteor trails were responsible and that radar could be used to track meteor streams, and could of course do so by day as well as by night. When he tried to increase the sensitivity of his radar in order to track V-2s from a greater distance, he rediscovered the cosmic radio noise that Karl Jansky and Grote Reber had found in the 1930s.Hey's results of 1942 and 1944 could not be published until after the war. From 1945 to 1947, Hey used AORG's radars in Richmond Park to research his wartime radio astronomical discoveries further. The Richmond Park installation thus effectively became the first radio observatory in Britain. Hey's main colleagues in this work were John Parsons (1918–1992), an electrical and mechanical engineer; Gordon Stewart (1919–2003), an electrical engineer; and James Phillips (1914–2003), a mathematician, who like Hey had been a schoolmaster before the war. In 1946 the Sun became active again, and the group confirmed sunspots and solar flares as the source of the emissions. In 1945 and 1946 they confirmed radar echoes from meteors, and derived methods to derive meteor shower radiants from the echoes, so discovering the first daytime meteor shower. In 1945 and 1946 they mapped the intensity of cosmic radio noise across the sky. In February 1946 they discovered a strong source in Cygnus which scintillated rapidly. Hey realised that the scintillation meant that the source must be compact, and suggested that it was a 'radio star'. It was later shown to be Cygnus A, a radio galaxy. This was, after Hey's discovery of the radio Sun, the first discovery of a specific astronomical radio source. During this period visitors to Hey at Richmond Park included Bernard Lovell, whom Hey helped to establish his radio observatory at the University of Manchester, and Jack Ratcliffe, under whom Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish established radio astronomy at Cambridge. Hey's observatory in Richmond Park was closed in 1947.Hey became Head of the AORG in 1949. From 1952 he returned to ADRDE, which later became part of the Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern, Worcestershire, where he also continued his radio astronomical observations. At his observatory at Defford, Worcestershire, he built a variable-spacing radio interferometer, with which he briefly parallelled Martin Ryle's research at Cambridge. From 1966 until his retirement in 1969 Hey was head of the research department.This lot came from the Jim Wiggins collection we purchased in July 2022. Jim Wiggins accumulated the most unique and valuable autograph collection over a period of 70-plus years. He obtained his collection either in person or by writing to persons of fame and notoriety. Comes with a full Letter of Authenticity from Todd Mueller Authentics.