Later this year I’m going to a meeting in Australia, and while there we’ll be taking a tour of some of the country’s prominent astronomy facilities. One of them is the venerable Parkes Observatory, famous from the 2000 movie The Dish It is a great movie, by the way. One of the few that brings the world of science to the small screen without resorting to swooshing spacecraft bombing each other at faster-than-light speeds. (Nothing wrong with science fiction, I happen to like it a lot myself, but sometimes I like to see things that show the science I know and love, too.)
I’m especially interested in the radio telescopes of Australia, since I may be working on a radio astronomy media project over the next couple of years, and want to see as many as possible. Such facilities are fascinating places and I’ve been to a few over the years. Why, there’s one not far from my house in Massachusetts, called Haystack Observatory, and they are who I’ll be working with on my media project.
Another place I have visited a few times over the years is the Very Large Array, in Socorro, New Mexico. It was featured in the movie Contact along with the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico (which I haven’t been to, but hope to see someday).
Now, in The Dish, the Parkes radio telescope is shown as it was used in 1969 to relay video from the Moon’s surface during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Of course, the telescope has a longer history than that. Among other things, it has been used to do the Parkes Continuum Surveys, finding and cataloguing various radio sources in the sky. It is currently being used to study pulsars and many other radio sources continually. So, aside from the brief moment of fame this telescope gained in the late 60s, it has been online as an astronomy observatory for many decades.
Haystack Observatory is also a multi-decade achiever in radio astronomy, geodesy (the study of what’s going on with the planet we live on by using radio measurements of the stars), and atmospheric sciences. This observatory’s ongoing mission should provide a rich field from which I can mine for my project.
Finally, VLA and Arecibo are also major contenders in the radio astronomy world. They continually track such sources as pulsars, black holes, and activities at the cores of galaxies. The way they were portrayed in the movie Contact, as search agents for extraterrestrial signals from aliens, is mostly a movie fiction. Arecibo was used some years back to beam a signal out to space, and data from Arecibo is scanned by the Seti@home folks for signals that might be from other civilizations. But, trust me, there’s nobody sitting at VLA with a headset on listening for signals. That’s a nice drama point, though. I happen to think that the better drama lies in the solid achievements these facilities have made to our understanding of the cosmos. And, I look forward to many more years of discoveries from all of the world’s radio astronomy facilities!
