Strapped for cash after the disastrous fire of January 2003 was followed by a smaller than expected insurance payout and by the usual Federal Government parsimony towards science which had the observatory getting less cash than that supplied for the imaginary dredging of Tumbi Umbi creek the observatory was forced to innovate.
Concluding that radio astronomy was viable in spite of the light pollution, political bovine fertiliser and hot air that Canberra politicians are noted for, an exciting variant of the Mills Cross was developed at low cost.
Sufficient coaxial cable was purchased to link together every farm fence within a 90km radius of Mt Stromlo to create a flat dish, or radio platter 180km in diameter with one 5 metre steerable dish at each cardinal point of the compass on the outer boundary.
This gave the telescope a significant pointing capacity as once the steerable scopes were pointed at a designated object the rest of the platter could be similarly "pointed" by simply allowing for the minute time lag in signals received by the various components.
It was found that rabbit-proof fences offered particular sensitivity because of a sympathetic reaction between the strands of barbed wire at the top and the 1.6 metres of fine mesh half buried - literally earthed, in the ground.
The signals were fed through a local area network of PC's owned by High School students and the results correlated at Mission Control in a prefabricated farm shed on Mt Stromlo.
The initial and quite unexpected discovery was of a large starless galaxy spanning six degrees of sky and situated midway between the SMC and the LMC.
Preliminary reductions show that this object was formed by a violent collision between these two objects nine million years ago, so that as the component stars passed through each other like flocks of migratory birds, much gas and interstellar matter was left behind clumped together in tightly orbiting masses moving in stable orbits.
Once the initial friction had died down, and in the absence of interior stars to light up these clouds they became invisible except at radio frequencies. Once informed of the discovery, super sensitive observer Andrew Murrell turned his twenty inch Dobsonian in that direction, and though the object was too large to fit in his widest field eyepiece, Andrew convinced himself that he could glimpse it in his Telrad when using a narrow bandwidth ultra-red filter.
Though other observers have so far failed to duplicate this feat this is not unusual as Andrew's night vision is in a class of its own, so superb in fact as to lead other deep sky observers to wonder if he was born long ago in a far galaxy. In honour of Andrew's observational feats, this galaxy has been provisionally designated "MURRELL 2" and the search for starless galaxies expanded to take in the Centaurus galaxy cluster.