I once played a very brief game of cricket in the Lovell Telescope (after a resurface but before it got properly tuned) because we wanted to recreate a scene from The Dish.

[cornellbox@a2mi.social]

@slowe

This is the kind of wonderful weirdness that good social media provides, and this absolutely made my morning brighter.

[krutonium@social.treehouse.systems]

@LDJ @slowe His whole recent series where he's doing something in every county in England is fantastic, if you want more!

[loppygnome@mastodonapp.uk]

@slowe

Thanks for sharing your photos and experiences.

Here’s a quick timelapse I took of it swinging into place to be used as the projection screen during the bluedot festival.

[valdebaran@photog.social]

@slowe

This is the kind of content I subscribed to twitter for - in these old times...

[_thegeoff@mastodon.social]

@slowe What's the equivalent of "optically perfect" in terms of damage on that surface? A centimetre or so?

[slowe@mastodon.me.uk]

@_thegeoff As I remember it, you want a surface smooth to 1/8th wavelength or better. So, to observe at 6GHz (5cm) the average (root mean square) deviation should be roughly half a centimetre or better. You get deviation within panels on the surface, between panels, and due to the overall shape changing at different elevations. This page from 2008 talks about surface setting https://www.jb.man.ac.uk/tech/lovellupgrade/adjust.html The image shows deviations from a parabola across the dish before they tuned the surface.