To Canberra and back, Part 3

So by late morning we were heading out of Coonabarabran and down the Newell to Gilgandra and onto the outskirts of Dubbo.   (Lunch at Subway, where the young girl microwaved the steak pieces before putting them on the roll and then toasting it with the cheese on top.  In my local Brisbane one, they don't do that - just put the cheese on top and toast it.   Well done, Dubbo Subway.)

Continue onto Parkes, where we did a right left turn out towards Orange and the tiny town of Manildra, where we turned south to Canberra.  See the Bing map:

  

According to Bing it's 615 km and 6 hours 44 min driving, but it sure seems longer than that.  The countryside has some geography to it, but not a lot.   The driving is easy enough, but rolling hillsides stretching off into the distance for scores of kilometres do get a bit same-y.  (This is particularly true of the stretch from Cowra south to Canberra.)   

It was also tricky knowing exactly the right route out of Parkes, especially as I had missed printing out the Google map for that section.We worked it out eventually, but a proper touring map would have helped.

The real reason for taking this slightly indirect route to Canberra was to drop in on the Parkes radio telescope.   It has a nice new-ish visitor centre, paid for from money made from the movie The Dish (which I have never fully seen, seeing it got luke warm reviews.)  It's a very photogenic piece of science kit:

Here's another photo showing an old bit off the telescope, which everyone must assume looks like a mock lunar lander:

But here's the explanation as to what it really is (click to enlarge and you should be able to read it):

The telescope was built in 1961, but it has been upgraded many times.  The CSIRO explains how actively it is still used:

The telescope operates twenty four hours per day, through rain and cloud. About 85 per cent of all time each year is scheduled for observing. Less than five per cent of that is lost because of high winds or equipment problems. Most of the rest of the time each year is used for maintenance and testing. Around 300 researchers use the telescope each year, and more than 40 per cent of these users are from overseas.

The moving part of the dish is not fixed to the top of the tower but just sits on it. Because the large surface catches the wind like a sail, the telescope must be 'stowed' (pointed directly up) when the wind exceeds 35 km an hour.

There is a folder in the visitor centre explaining what listening programs are currently underway.  I noted that they are still listening to pulsars, but I don't think the reason why was really explained.  (I also wondered how often they continuously listen to any individual pulsar.  If, as I suspect, it is only a matter of minutes, not hours, one hopes they haven't ever missed out on one suddenly doing the equivalent of chiming at midnight - or playing Jingle Bells.) 

We did see the dish rotating around too - yay.  See - it was pointing in a different direction when we first arrived:

So there you go.  The visitor centre does the best it can, perhaps, on a kinda difficult area of astronomy to explain quickly to the public or the kiddies.   And another odd thing about the place - they have lots of warning signs about snakes being around the gardens and lawns as you walk out of the building.  I assume they are a particular problem there, although given it's pretty much in the middle of ordinary farming land, it's hard to see why.



From there it was out to buy some roadside cherries (from "down the road" at Young) - they were delicious when we ate them later in Canberra.  And then out through the never ending, rolling brown hills that surround Canberra for a long way out.

(We passed through Cowra, but only stopped for petrol.  It looks a nice enough town too.)

I think we got into Canberra around 7.30 or 8 pm.  More about that in Part 4.