The Arecibo Radio Telescope

One must understand that, as home to Earth’s most sensitive radio telescope, the Arecibo National Observatory handles a broad range of tasks, SETI@Home a low priority. It only a small portion of each day scanning the sky for extraterrestrial signals, but this is plenty time to keep 52,411,88 home computers busy. Run by the National Atmosphere and Ionosphere Center (NAIC), its attention is focused mainly on Earth’s atmosphere, which it can view with extreme precision using radio waves. Being a radio telescope, Arecibo does not enhance visual pictures like a pair of binoculars or a magnifying glass. Instead, it measures radio waves coming from the atmosphere and above, which are bounced off its 1000 feet-in-diameter spherical dome up into a Gregorian dome, which houses diverse antenna arrays.