Arecibo Radio Telescope

Thursday, 4th August 2005 by

Well here it is, the one that literally hundreds of you have submitted over the past few months. We held off posting it because it would be so much better to see this is high-res. However here it is (finally), the Arecibo radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It is officially the largest single-dish radio telescope ever built; it's 305 metres in diameter, 50 metres deep, and it covers an area of roughly 73,000 square metres! Wow, huge.

You may recognise the telescope from somewhere... this is the where they collect the data for SETI@home, it was in Contact and it was also used as Alec Trevelyan's antenna in GoldenEye!

To make up for the poor resolution on this entry, here's a super high-res aerial shot for you to investigate. The official site has loads of great images too, and the Wikipedia entry has all the facts and figures you could ever desire.

Apparently any person in the world may use the telescope, providing their proposal is selected by a review committee. Any ideas for how we might put it to good use?

Juan Cabanela might have been the very first person to send us this, so he's getting the credit! Thanks to all of you who submitted it though.