Bear Lake Radio Telescope

Wednesday, 19th October 2005 by

This is the Bear Lake Radio Telescope outside of Moscow, and for such a big thing it was incredibly hard to track down any information about it.

Initially I had no idea what it was called, but after some extensive Googling I located a page which claimed this is a TNA-1500 radio telescope with a 64 metre diameter. It doesn't look quite that big to me, but it certainly isn't far off.

Supposedly there are several other telescopes which alongside this one make up the Russian Deep Space Network. The same page I mentioned above says they're located at Ussuriisk, Kalyasin, Yevpatoria and Shchelkovo. Unfortunately only Shchelkovo is in high-res, but after lengthy scrolling around I simply cannot see it for the life of me.

Mind you, the page was written in 1996...

Thanks to Sven.

Update: Chad found the Shchelkovo telescopes, and there's tons of them! Three are shown side by side in our bonus thumbnail, and there's also one with a very cool shadow too. Thanks Chad 🙂