Australian Dishes And Telescopes
Telescopes have long allowed us to peer excitedly into the night sky, spotting distant stars and planets. You might have memories of being a child and looking through the eyepiece of a telescope to get a glimpse of Mars. Maybe you're still into telescopes. Either way, here in Australia, our telescopes mean business - they're a lot bigger than your dad's astronomy kit. Check out these space seers from all over the country.
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We Get The Message
The message from outer space, that is. But this isn't communication from an alien source - the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex is a radio receiver for deep space phone calls from fellow humans (as well as robots) we've sent into space. What this means is it helps keeps spacecraft missions communicating with Earth, and allows them to send back important data and information. It's part of the larger Deep Space Network, an international network of dish communicators and receivers spread throughout the world and administrated by NASA
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Going The Distance
This is an image of the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope, run by Sydney University and situated near Canberra. The telescope surveys the southern hemisphere and was key in creating a wide field radio image of the southern sky. The east - west arm of the telescope is 778 metres long. Impressive!
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Cartographer Of Space
'Cartographer of Space' is just a fancy way of saying 'SkyMapper,' the name of this telescope. The SkyMapper is located in northern NSW and is operated by the Australian National University. It was built to survey the southern sky, much like the Molonglo telescope you'll see in this gallery, but this 'scope takes photographs rather than radio images. Mapping the southern sky is carried out in tandem with the mapping of the northern hemisphere by a telescope in New Mexico, USA. Their telescope is bigger than ours. Size isn't everything,
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To The Moon And Back
Parkes Observatory is quite a historic telescope - it played an important role in the NASA mission which landed the first men on the moon. Completed in 1961, Parkes has the second largest dish in the southern hemisphere and is used primarily for radio tracking of spacecraft. Historically, it's best recognised as one of the three radio telescopes to receive a signal when TV began broadcasting from the cameras of the first moon landing. Such was the receptive quality of Parkes, NASA broadcast the signal they received for the entire moon bulle
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Productivity Plus
This is the Anglo-Australian Telescope, quite the jewel in our nation's telescopic crown. According to Astronomische Nachrichten, the AAT is one of the most scientifically productive telescopes in the world. It's located in northern NSW and is shared among a number of scientists and scientific bodies. It's most notable for producing impressive photographs of space as well as discovering extrasolar planets (planets outside our solar system).
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Inside The Dome
Couldn't resist putting this picture in - I think it's pretty cool. What you're seeing is a vision from inside the Anglo-Australian Telescope to the hardware itself. The telescope is 3.9 metres long and is optical. It was commissioned in 1974 and aimed to give vision of the southern skies at a time when most other telescopes were pointing the other way.
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Field Of Vision
The Murchison Widefield Array is quite different from other devices that see into the night sky. It's a radio telescope with no moving parts, but hundreds of antennas which stretch over a large distance in outback Western Australia. The array has a number of functions - it aims to look at the Epoch of Reionisation (the time in our universe's history where the first luminous sources came into existence), as well as the Sun and coronal mass ejections. It'll also be checking out pulsars below 300MHz. Neat.
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Solving The Big Questions
This array of radio telescopes, begun in 2009, is still under construction. When finished, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (which reduces neatly to the acronym ASKAP) aims to solve some of the big questions of the universe - how galaxies form, the evolution and population of galaxies, and the magnetic forces which reside and effect the universe. Physically, it is 36 identical antennas, each 12 metres wide, that will act in unison to view the universe.