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Are you sure? I recall that the dish was spherical, not parabolic, and had a movable receiver mounted on cables; moving the receiver adjusts the direction from
by jamesmaniscalco 3y ago
Are you sure? I recall that the dish was spherical, not parabolic, and had a movable receiver mounted on cables; moving the receiver adjusts the direction from which signals can be received. Indeed, Wikipedia claims that it was steerable [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory
- ben_w 3y agoYou're kinda both right; the dish itself was fixed, but the system as a whole still had limited steerability because it was (spherical?) instead of parabolic, allowing 20° of the zenith. This was still a lot more limited than the horizon-to-horizon of the other iconic radio telescope type: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CSIRO_ScienceImage_8220_The_Radio_Telescope_at_Parkes.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CSIRO_ScienceImage_8...
- whatshisface 3y agoThe competition for giant Arecibo-like telescopes is arrays, and since their cross section goes to zero as you turn them towards the horizon (straight up and they're spaced out, from the horizon they're in a line), they are limited within some reasonable range of the zenith as well.