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.

Tidbinbilla's hard rock cafe

It was lunchtime and we were visiting the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communication Complex near Canberra. It's run by the CSIRO for NASA, and its job is to communicate with NASA's various space probes around the solar system.

It was particularly busy in the late 60s and early 70s, when Americans were commuting to and from the moon, bringing back moon rock specimens like the one in the display case. Also on display are some leftover astronaut food packages from the time, and don't they look disgusting!

Which brings me back to lunchtime. The cafe is called the Moon Rock Cafe, and some of their offerings were only marginally more appetising. We played safe, and had OK wraps and a salad, but the people on the next table left their sausage rolls almost untouched.


Overall it was a very enjoyable and informative visit. The visitor centre has space suits to try out, and shrunken versions of space rockets and moon capsules galore. Maybe it's relativity or something that causes them to come back so much smaller. Fabulous educational exhibits too on the many astronomical breakthroughs that have come out of space based observations.

















And below is Voyager 2 broadcasting its pictures back to us from Uranus in 1986.