visiting. The grounds also contain a plantation of sequoia redwoods from California, Giants' Grove, which are available for sponsorship, and the trees from a past sponsorship scheme operated with Crann. Astronomy The "Great Telescope" – The Leviathan A major feature on the grounds of the castle is the "Great Telescope" or Leviathan of Parsonstown or The Rosse Telescope of the third Earl of Rosse, an astronomical telescope with a 183-cm (72 in) reflector. It was completed in 1845 and was used for several decades before the last observations were made in the first years of the 20th century. Its record size was not surpassed until the completion of the 100-inch (2.5-meter) Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in 1917. It was dismantled in 1914, but the structure was restored and the telescope reconstructed in the 1990s and is accessible to the public, with occasional demonstrations of its movement, and talks. Modern radio-telescopy The demesne hosts two radio-telescopy projects in the Mount Palmer division near the Little Brosna and the County Tipperary border. Astrophysicist Peter T. Gallagher of Trinity College Dublin met Lord Rosse in 2010 while visiting the Demesne in search of suitable quiet sites for radio-telescopy projects, and they agreed to repurpose an old sheep yard. The agreement led to the establishment of the Rosse Solar-Terrestrial Observatory, a Trinity College Dublin project, which was formally opened and blessed on June 28, 2014, though already fully functional, with antennae picking up solar activity, even in cloudy weather. The sheep pen building was converted into a control room, and a magnetometer, jointly operated between TCD and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, was also installed. Already by 2014, a major solar burst was detected by the Birr system, and reported in Nature Physics. In the meantime, the project team started work on establishing the I-LOFAR radio-telescope station (IE613), a node in a Europe-spanning network, which was largely built in 2016, and was switched on at Birr in 2017. Constructed in fields in the Mount Palmer area, between the Rivers Camcor and Little Brosna, it comprises around 3,000 antennae and 55 km of cabling, and Eircom installed upgraded fibre to enable massive data carriage for it. This is the westernmost station in the LOFAR network. The I-LOFAR telescope, in 2018, observed for the first time a billion-year-old red-dwarf, flare star called CN Leo, almost 75 trillion kilometres away. There is a viewing