MAS are doing a tour of Peak Hill gold mine in the morning (Saturday) and will be at the Dish from 12:15 until 16:00. Might catch up with some of you there We'll be the ones with the "MAS" logo on our shirts.
Reached Parkes after a pleasant drive from Melb.
But torrential rain 2k's around the dish. Clouds everywhere. sigh!!
looking forward to tomorrow. Looks like it'll be a big turnout.
I could only get accommodation at Peak Hill.
Had a superb day as well. Went on the dish tour twice, spoke to a few scientists and engineers, heard about the awesome computing power of the Askap array, fabulous evening at the opera with the dish as the backdrop and fireworks at the end. unforgettable. a lucky family won the first prize at the raffle, a hay ride on the dish in the morning.
a few facts I didn't know about the dish (as mentioned by the tour guides)
there is actually an optical telescope inside the dish and they use a laser with that to point to the target or required position, and the dish apparently follows.!! in the olden days, a person used to sit inside and man the optical telescope and control the dish. the optical is called the MEQ, Master Equatorial.
the counter weights alone are 400 tons, with the whole dish weighing close to 1000 tons.
the azimuth axis has 4 conical rollers for its friction drive with 30000:1 reduction gearboxes driven by DC motors. They do use encoders but not sure if they're optical or other.
There are actually two independent foundations, the dish has its own, and the tower its own. you can see the gap between the two from the inside.
the cables from the control room and ground go to junction boxes, and from there go into a "twister room" which allows the dish to rotate a max of 540 degrees in one direction ad will then need to rotate in the opposite direction to "unwind" the cables.
the CSIRO CEO mentioned that the dish was instrumental in discovering a planet made completely out of diamond this year. not sure how.
the dish has to have a person on site, with sort of a dead mans switch. if the motion sensors don't detect movement in 15 mins, alarms go off.
the ASKAP array sensors transfer an immense amount of data from the dish at the rate of 2 Terabits/sec. that is then filtered and downsampled by onsite computers to 2 Gbps. that is then relayed to supercomputers that analyze the dataset.
One of the scientists also mentioned that he often books time on the parkes dish rather than on more powerful arrays as he gets his data the same day, whereas with the arrays the computation required to phase and then upload the data can take days before he can start work on it. I found that interesting.
We'll be the ones with the "MAS" logo on our shirts.
...where have I been 
