A short tour of the Parkes radio telescope

That's a very good look at the telescope. They don't do guided tours for the general public though.

It's quite a site to behold, basically an alt-azimuth design writ large and as you crest the mild rise ( coming from the south ) you see this ruddy great dish sited amongst a lightly wooded area. This dish sits atop a relatively small pedestal of a building. The sheep with their unrelenting flies in the daytime heat deserve a mention, as do the snakes. You are advised/requested to turn off mobile phones, wifi devices etc. The visitors centre, where school children abound, has a small plaque commemorating Edward 'Taffy' Bowen, who supervised the construction. He was a British radar researcher in WWII and made Australia his home post war. Now if you also go to the Tidbinbilla Radio Telescope near Canberra they will claim it was they who received & relayed the TV signals from the Apollo 11 landing ie. Neil Armstrong's first footprints on the Moon, and not Parkes as depicted the movie The Dish ( 2000 )^*. It's a good story either way. The receiver technology used has been upgraded throughout the years. I think they help track the two Voyager spacecraft, it's either them and/or Tidbinbilla. We have used data from Parkes here at E@H to search for new pulsars. I got myself a booklet with a cardboard cut-out model kit of the dish and an ice-cream to go. :-)

Cheers, Mike.

* The director of which was Rob Sitch, once a medical student at Melbourne University a year below mine in the early/mid 80's. A really clever guy, who evidently got a better offer and left the profession and went on to do many comedic roles acting/directing/writing/producing. It's weird how years later you see stuff and remember a name from before, don't believe at first but then you do find out it was them after all. Anyway, enough name-dropping!