Largest Telescope ever due for completion.

[brantuk]

Look at this beast - more than twice the size of Jodrell Bank's dish:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37453933

Awesome or wot?

[Tiny Small]

Lol. Substantially more than twice the size.

[Yamez]

Ah, I've read about this in Septembers issue of Sky at Night magazine. It looks amazing and well, very big. 

[brantuk]

Ooops ! looks like I'm out by a factor of almost 8x lol.

[101nut]

It may be bigger than Jodrell Bank but I'd like to see them try to point it! :-)

Be interesting to see how its results compare to an array of smaller dishes.

AndyG

[antony_courtney1987]

Incredible, how are they going to aim it though?!

[Pippy]

You can aim it to limited extent by moving the feed antenna(S) off center, though the further away from center you go, the less efficient the focusing gets, but with so much gain it's managable.

 

[Pippy]

You'd need 44 joderel bank dishes to have the same gain as a single 500m dish.

[brantuk]

It's made up of a whole bunch of triangular bits that can be pointed individually or all together. Bit like a large wiffle tree though not quite exactly - she describes it in the video on the link page.

[Pippy]

27 minutes ago, brantuk said:

It's made up of a whole bunch of triangular bits that can be pointed individually or all together. Bit like a large wiffle tree though not quite exactly - she describes it in the video on the link page.

Ah !

plus, although it's 500m in diameter, they can only adjust the reflectors shape to maintain a 300m diameter parabolic surface. So basically, it's a 300m dish rather than 500m.

That means it's like having 15 * 76m Jodrell Bank dishes all close to each other.