Parkes still dishing it up

It's still one of the things you've got to do if you're passing through Parkes. You've got to visit The Dish. If you time it right, you can even check out the visitor centre and learn lots.

We turned up a bit late in the afternoon. But even so there was a nice little garden to explore, with some interesting astronomically-themed artefacts and learning experiences. There's even a rather brilliant arrangement of two smaller dishes, which illustrate the magnifying powers of parabolas, and enable you to communicate by whisper with somebody stationed 100m away.

Officially the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope, The Dish is put to work on lots of cutting edge deep-space projects involving pulsars and gravity waves and the like.

It's best known though for its use during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, when it received the TV broadcast to the world of most of the astronauts' moon walk.

And of course it starred in the 2000 movie, The Dish.