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It was a long drive (about four or five hours) to get to Parkes. We went on a bit of a detour to take in some of the local flavor of a town called Gundagai, located on the Murrumbidgee River south-southwest of Sydney, including a drive-by of an incredible wooden railroad bridge built over the alluvial flats of the river.
However, the most famous connection to Gundagai is the "Dog on the Tuckerbox" song about a faithful dog who rode with bullock drivers and "guarded" the tucker (food) box.
 Gundagai tour
Dog on the Tuckerbox
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We all admired the bronze monument to the Dog on the Tuckerbox and visited the coffee and giftshop right nearby.
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The monument has several display signs, along with picnic tables nearby. It was a bit rainy and cold when we were there, but it's probably a really nice little stop in the summer time.
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There's an alternate tale about the Dog in the Tuckerbox that seems to suggest that the dog wasn't "sitting" on the box, but rather doing his business there, possibly as a "reward" to the bullock driver who didn't feed him. Of course it's all apocryphal, but this alternate meaning to the song is somewhat obliquely suggested in the signpost sending visitors to the Doggy Loo.
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We bade a fond farewell to the Tuckerbox dog and got back on the road to Parkes. Our second rest stop was at Grenfell, where we had a quarter hour to walk around a quiet little park near the center of town.
Grenfell
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At Forbes (stand-in city location for Parkes in "The Dish"), we made our final turnoff to the real town of Parkes, which lies 20 kilometers south of the telescope.
The approach to the observatory is down a quiet, tree-lined avenue out in the country.
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We arrived at the Parkes Observatory in the early afternoon. Fortunately, the Visitor Centre knew we were coming, and kept their café open so we could get lunch.
Just inside the front door of the center is a display about "The Dish."
Parkes CSIRO Radio Telescope
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The dish is behind a security fence, next to a display of the old central horn structure of the dish before they put modern feeds at the center of the dish.
Carolyn noticed the Moon in the sky and angled around to get a picture with the center feed of the dish "pointed" at the Moon (sort of in honor of this dish's contributions to the Apollo program.)
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The fellow in charge of the Visitor Centre, named John Smith, took Mark and Carolyn out to do some all-sky photography. Carolyn shot a ground-level view of the smaller dish that accompanies the big antenna.
Mark found the ideal spot to include both the Dish as well as the tree-lined drive (at top) featured in the movie's opening and closing scenes.
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We divided our group into two smaller ones for the official tour, because there's not a lot of room in the control area and the catwalks! Everyone had to put on hard hats — things can fall off telescopes this big and it's better to be safe than sorry.
Up in the first floor control level, John gave us some background on the telescope and its ongoing projects.
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The control panels for the various pieces of the telescope featured lots of patch cords and flashing lights. The main computer system is fairly old by current standards, but very reliable. Of course things have changed since the days when people ran the telescope manually all the time, though they still do that here. Nowadays computers handle most of the control and data processing for the astronomers who use the dish.
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The control room racks take up most of the floor space, leaving a little area to walk through to each desk.
The system's correlator takes signals from the big dish and any other dishes it happens to be observing with, and meshes the data streams together. (This pic is for Roger Cappallo, head correlator guru at Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts!)
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The Parkes radio telescope is used for a variety of research programs, including a pulsar search effort and the SERENDIP program of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
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Of course we had to get our pictures taken in the control room!
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To get up to the next control level, John took us out on the catwalks to see how the dish moves in its track.
The view of the Visitor Centre from up there was really quite nice!
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From the catwalk the other dish looks so much smaller! The movie tells us the Dish is located in a sheep paddock, but we didn't see any from here. We did see kangaroos, though!
While we entered on a new road, access to Parkes used to be along a long, straight country lane. The ending helicopter shot of "The Dish" aims down this lane.
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All too soon it was time for our group to turn over our hard hats to the other group. We made our way out with some last admiring looks, and then headed to the Dish Café for some coffee and a bottle of "Dish" water before the place closed up.
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We also visited the gift shop, where we both bought some nice polo shirts.
Carolyn found a copy of the book Bad Astronomy by her friend Phil Plait, and took pictures for his "my books are all over the world" collection.
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Pretty soon we saw the other group headed up the catwalk. While we got to be inside while the dish was moving, they got to chat with the astronomer who was moving it, on duty doing pulsar searches.
Parkes really is a very pretty radio telescope. You can't take a bad picture of it.
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While were sitting at the café garden relaxing, we watched these playful birds called galars. They would chase each other, fly around the dish, float on the air currents rising from it, and try to land on it while moving. Sometimes one would miss the perch and go sliding down into the dish. It would just pick itself up, shake off, and get right back to playing again. All in all, watching them was a great way to end a marvelous visit to the Parkes Radio Telescope.
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We headed into the town of Parkes, where we dined at the restaurant in the Country Comfort.
Country Comfort Parkes
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