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Astronomy and Space
The second largest movable dish telescope in the Southern Hemisphere is the 64-metre movable dish telescope at the Parkes Observatory, 20 kilometres north of the town of Parkes, NSW. If you saw the movie The Dish, you'll remember that Parkes Observatory (control name PKS) was one of several radio antennas used to receive images of the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969.
Parks Observatory has continued to play a part in tracking space missions including the Mariners 2 and 4, Voyager, Giotto, Galileo and Cassini-Huygens probes. Parks has also become a major world research centre for pulsars, with more than half of those currently known today discovered at the Parkes Observatory.