Lifting 130-foot radio telescope dish onto pedestal

This year marks two important anniversaries for the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO), one of the largest university-operated radio telescope facilities in the world. Managed by the Caltech Astronomy department and located on the East side of the Sierra Nevada, OVRO was inaugurated in 1958 and continues observations to this day.

Its iconic 130-foot radio antenna was dedicated on October 18, 1968, and it soon made its mark in the single-dish spectroscopy of interstellar clouds and in very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), paired with antennas thousands of kilometers away. Here is a selection of photos from our OVRO collections, chronicling the construction of the 130-foot radio telescope. EP -Posted 10-18-2018