Australia Telescope

An Australian radio astronomy facility opened in 1988. It consists of a number of antennas at three separate sites in New South Wales and is designed to employ the aperture synthesis technique of mapping astronomical radio sources. It is the only such array in the southern hemisphere. The Compact Array, located at the Paul Wild Observatory at Culgoora near Narrabri, consists of six antennas, each 22 metres (72-feet) in diameter. Five can be moved along a common east-west track, 3 kilometres (2 miles) long. The sixth is on its own track, a further 3 kilometres to the west. Greater resolving power is achieved by linking one or more of the antennas in the Compact Array with a seventh new 22-metre dish, 100 kilometres (60 miles) to the south at Mopra, near the Siding Spring optical observatory, and the 64-metre (210-foot) dish at Parkes, which was completed in 1961 and is a further 200 kilometres (120 miles) to the south. Together, these antennas form the Long Baseline Array. A notable feature of the Australia Telescope is the particularly large range of wavelengths at which it can observe. This facility makes it possible to map the emission from interstellar molecules of spectral lines in the radio region of the spectrum.