SETI League Photo Gallery

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Located at Medecina near Bologna, the Istituto di Radioastonomia of the CNR (National Council of Research) is home to the Croce del Nord (Northern Cross), the world's largest transit radio telescope. It has been operating on a frequency of 408 MHz, continuously since 1964. SETI League photo

The East-West line of the Northern Cross radio telescope (only a portion of which can be seen here) is a cylindrical parabola, 564 meters long and 35 meters wide, steerable in declination only. SETI League photo

The Northern Cross radio telescope's "mirrors" consist of parallel steel wires separated by a distance of 2 cm. Their total collecting area is 30,000 square meters. If you look closely, you can see the Moon through the telescope's reflector. SETI League photo

The North-South arm of the Northern Cross, 630 meters long, consists of 64 aligned cylinder-parabolic antennas, each 23.5 meters long and 8 meters wide, placed at 10 meter intervals. In the background you can see the 32-meter VLBI antenna which is home to SETI Italia's SERENDIP experiment. SETI League photo

SETI League executive director H. Paul Shuch visits the 32-meter dish, with Cassegrain optics and a 3-meter subreflector, which is used for SETI Italia's SERENDIP project. This antenna, constructed in 1983, is part of the European VLBI Network. Its cryogenic receivers operate in multiple frequency bands between 327 MHz and 43 GHz. SETI League photo

SETI Italia chief scientist Stelio Montebugnoli shows off the SERENDIP processors. Six boards of 4 million channels each were obtained from the University of California, Berkeley. The resulting 24 million channels, each with a bin width of 0.6 Hz, operate continuously as a parasitic SETI receiver. SETI League photo

This tower, equipped with multiple antennas operating on a variety of frequencies, is used by the Istituto di Radioastronomia to do radio frequency interference (RFI) studies. SETI League photo

On the roof of the Istituto's microwave laboratory, a waveguide horn antenna (similar to the one Harold Ewen and Edward Purcell used at Harvard University in 1951, to first detect interstellar hydrogen emissions at 1420 MHz) looks straight up, awaiting another major discovery. SETI League photo

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