The radio telescope just north of Parkes in central NSW was built in the early 1960's. It was made famous by the 2000 movie 'The Dish', which tells the story of the telescope's involvement in transmitting the pictures of the Apollo 11 moon landing to the world. We made a small detour on our journey north to check out the visitor centre and take a few photos.
Not being tech-heads, we found the visitor centre a little difficult. Although they had obviously tried hard to tell the story of the work that the telescope does in plain English, our heads were spinning by all the quasars, quarks, neutral hydrogen surveys and baseline interferometry arrays. We soothed our brains with a couple of 'Milky Way' shakes in the coffee shop, and got some amusement from the rest of the menu's offerings, including 'Moonistrone Soup'. We also had some fun with the pair of parabolic reflectors that enabled you to hear the whisper of someone at the other dish 100 metres away.
Probably the most unexpected thing we learnt from the visit was when we checked the timetable to see what the dish was working on at the time, which turned out to be a project for the Italian Space Agency. Who knew Italy had a space agency!
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