Photo credit: CSIRO

The Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), shown above during construction, was opened in 1988. It consists of six 22-m dishes with a maximum baseline of 6 km, together forming a earth-rotation radio interferometer. The ATCA – located near Narrabri in NSW – is continuously being upgraded, eg. by expanding its frequency range to cover 1 – 105 GHz, increasing the observing bandwidth by a factor ~20, adding a North-South spur for better imaging at millimeter wavelengths, installing a new supercomputer to correlate the incoming radio signals from the array, etc.

More images are available in our large collection of CSIRO science images , which includes 70 astronomy images. The whole science image archive currently holds 4127 images and videos.