36 radio telescopes, 3 cameras, 5 nights, 19,960 frames, result: awesome!

A day in the life of an ASKAP dish, via @CSIROnews

Australian photographer Alex Cherney of terrestro.com has done it again. This time he has brought the new radio astronomy dishes of CSIRO's ASKAP alive with this uplifting timelapse video.

ASKAP is the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder project. This is the first operational stage of the Australian and New Zealand component of the international Square Kilometre Array - the largest science project in the world.

There are 36 dishes scattered over six kilometres in the Murchison Desert east of Geraldton in Western Australian. It's a radio quiet zone, and more importantly for night sky photography it's virtually free of light pollution. And that is where Alex Cherney does his thing.

Enjoy the video - you may not see anything like this again. As Alex points out on his website, with the array now operating as of this Monday, other electronic equipment like cameras may not be allowed there again:


ASKAP Radio Telescope from Alex Cherney on Vimeo.

You can learn more about the Square kilometre Array through my interview with Australian project director Brian Boyle.