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.

Apollo 11 and a big blue moon

The Powerhouse Museum, like many other institutions around the world, has been doing its bit to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon visit earlier this year. They have a small but eye-catching array of exhibits to enjoy and experience.

 I was very taken by the big moon hanging from the ceiling. OK, it's smaller than the real one but a lot bigger than most moon globes.



The (replica) spacecraft on offer was actually a Mercury replica rather than an Apollo, but what the hell!
You could do virtual reality explorations of a moon walk, or conduct an actual moon landing yourself, driving a simulator. I was tempted to push in on the queue of youngsters wanting to do all this. But their need was greater than mine, I decided. I'd lived through the 1969 events myself, after all.




















I've written about the Powerhouse Museum before. About what a fine institution it is, but how it's being closed down and shipped out from its unique site next year, presumably so the government can hand over the land to the property developers that actually run the state. See here: April 2018 Powerhouse post