Clark Lake Radio Observatory

 observatory, abandoned / shut down, interesting place, historic ruins

 Upload a photo

Although the observatory, built in 1966, has been removed, the below passage explains what it did while operational:

"A new, fully steerable, decametric array for radio astronomy has been built at the Clark Lake Radio Observatory near Borrego Springs, California. This array is a “T” of 720 conical spiral antennas (teepee-shaped antennas), 3.0 km by 1.8 km. It is capable of operating between 15 and 125 MHz but has best sensitivity in the 25 to 75 MHz range. Both its operating frequency and beam position are adjustable in ∼ ms.

A 1024 channel digital correlator has been built and attached to the array. This permits the simultaneous measurement of the complex visibility functions on 512 interferometer baselines between various portions of the array. After Fourier transformation these visibility data yield a 32 × 32 resolution element picture of the area of sky under observation, with frequency-dependent angular resolution ranging from 20′ to 2.7′ and a sensitivity of 1 Jy per beam. The system is described, and some initial observations are presented."

www.aspbooks.org/a/volumes/article_details/?paper_id=28...