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How Does a Single Dish Telescope Make Images?

-- | April 13, 2016

Question: How does a single-dish telescope, such as Green Bank, produce images–at least images of more than one pixel? By physically steering the telescope to aim at slightly different patches of the sky? — Kent

Answer: You have it right! Images are made with the Green Bank Telescope by moving the antenna to point at different positions on the sky, then stitching those measurements together to make an image. Some of the detectors on the Green Bank Telescope have multiple pixels, which makes this mapping process quite a bit faster since you can cover a larger patch of sky with each pointing.

Jeff Mangum

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