Australia Telescope Compact Array

This morning we enjoyed a very pleasant visit to the site of Australia Telescope, where we watched the reconfiguration of 5 of the 6 parabolic dishes used in radio astronomy. The process of moving these along the tracks to their designated positions took around 4 hours. The picture shows to five dishes in the vertical postion prior to their tilting, rotation and focussing to be undertaken from the control centre on site at the Paul Wild Observatory.
In the control centre, the signals from each antenna are combined with those from every other antenna, in a series of pairwise comparisions, to build up a picture of cosmic radio sources.