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There are two things the small village of Knockin in Shropshire is supposed to be famous for. The local store supposedly labelled the "Knockin Shop"* and the radio telescope on the outskirts of the village.

I can't vouch for the name of the shop (although insists it's true, hmmmm) but I have stood in the dish of the radio telescope. It's part of a network of 6 dishes controlled from Joderell Bank. These form the MERLIN radio telescope which stands for Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network.

You join up all these different smaller telescopes and effectively create one much larger one with all the benefits that brings for astronomers.

MERLIN has had some noticeable successes. With the Hubble Space Telescope it was responsible for spotting the first in 1998. Phenomena where the gravity of a really massive object such as a galaxy bends the light coming from behind it so that from earth it forms a ring.

But MERLIN did have its downside. Not least the problem of a network of dishes spread over hundreds of miles. The amount of data that could be gathered and sent back was limited and sometimes engineers would have to be sent out to each dish before certain measurements could be taken.

So the whole network has been upgraded and renamed from MERLIN to . Faster data links mean the researchers can collect much more data than ever before and that will improve their results. And the picture at the top of this post is the first image from the new e-MERLIN telescope.

Although this is called a "double quasar" in fact there's only one. But as with the "Einstein Ring" the light is bent by a galaxy. In this case in such a way that you don't get a ring, but instead we see two images of the quasar itself. In the second picture the researchers have labelled everything in the picture so you can see what's going on.

You can also see a jet of matter leaving the quasar which is moving at the speed of light. Here the bending caused by the galaxy has given the jet a distorted curved look. And the quasar itself is actually a galaxy powered by a super-massive black hole. Which may be the coolest thing I've ever written on this blog.

Now the team will be testing e-MERLIN and using it to examine everything from planets orbiting nearby stars to black holes and galaxies. More .

There's a long list of people who have got e-MERLIN to this stage; The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the Northwest Development Agency, The University of Manchester, The University of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores University. The telescope is being operated by STFC and the University of Manchester.

*My producer says; "As a Shropshire lad, I can vouch for the name of the shop."

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