The Mopra Telescope is a 22-m single-dish radio telescope located at the edge of the Warrumbungle Mountains near Coonabarabran, about 450 km north-west of Sydney. A broad strip parallel to the coast of Eastern Australia, from North Queensland to Tasmania, including the Warrumbungles, has been affected by volcanic activity over the past 70 million years.  Volcanoes in the Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland, the Nandewar Ranges (Mt Kaputar National Park) near Narrabri, the Warrumbungles near Coonabarabran, and Mt Canobolas near Parkes get progressively younger towards the south. This suggests that as continental drift carried Australia north, it passed over a hotspot in the earth’s mantle, which erupted from time to time to form these mountains.  This volcanic activity ended around 13 million years ago, and since then erosion has removed softer rocks to leaving the harder domes and peaks now visible in the Warrumbungles National Park. The Mopra telescope was successfully used for several decades for millimetre waveband spectroscopy, and continues to be used as an element of the Long Baseline Array VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) network. (Image credit: CSIRO/Farmpix photography)