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Comment by Exuma | Hacker News Reader

I remember running SETI @ Home on my 300 MHz Gateway and watching the pretty graphs as if I was a real life alien spaceship pilot. It's funny to hear that it's actually a real thing (I knew it was real, but when I saw the size of the radio dish in the image, it's REALLY real)

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Its the Greenbank telescope in West Virginia. I don't think its particularly associated with SETI.

The telescope is available on a rental basis. People just schedule it to point it wherever.

> I don't think its particularly associated with SETI.

That depends on what you mean by "associated". It's not associated directly with SETI the institute, but it was the site of the first systematic/scientific search (and false positive) for extra-terrestrial intelligence lead by Frank Drake. It is also the place where The Order of the Dolphin (Drake, Carl Sagan, Otto Struve, et al.) met and developed the Drake Equation.

The one in the picture is the 100m dish. Frank Drake used the 25m dish. Just being nitpicky, I get your point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#History

The telescope there is amazing. It's worth a visit, they have a visitor's center and tours. I was there for the 50th anniversary celebration, in 2006, and want to go back some day.

Same on my 100 MHz Apricot. I like to think it helped. One thing that used to bug me is I wondered how much CPU time was being spent on rendering those graphs locally.

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