Where: 585 Telescope Road, Parkes, 2870
LGA: Parkes Shire
Region: Central West New South Wales
LGA: Parkes Shire Council
Country: Wiradjuri
Website: https://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/
Map below
Parkes in January: you either love it or loathe it. All depends on how you feel about the crooner once dubbed ‘the greatest star in the world’, or how much you depend on the millions of dollars his eponymous festival pumps into to this small inland town each year.
Because every January, even when temperatures soar to above 40˚C (104˚F), Parkes is invaded by hordes of Elvis Presley fans in dirndl skirts, jumpsuits, big hair dos, and retro-bling.
CSIRO’s Parkes Observatory float in the 2014 Elvis Street Parade. Photo: Merrill Findlay, 11 January 2014.
For many of these visitors, the Parkes Elvis Festival has become an annual pilgrimage; for others, a once-only must-do curiosity. Amy was in the latter category. She’d driven from the coast to meet up with fellow photographers and tick off not one but two must-dos on her bucket list: the Elvis Festival and the Parkes Radio Astronomy Observatory.
I met some of her photography mates at a night sky viewing and barbecue hosted by the Central West Astronomical Society (CWAS) near the rural village of Cookamidgera during the Festival. Amy wasn’t there. She was probably partying, or watching American tribute artist Donny Edwards channelling Elvis at the Parkes Leagues Club. More than enough stars were shining at Cookamidgera that night to impress the photographers though, even without Elvis and his tribute artists.
‘I found it really amazing that the sky is so clear and so many stars that you couldn’t imagine there could be,’ Gerry, a Sydney photographer, told me. Gerry had grown up in urban Malaysia where Orion’s Belt was one of the few asterisms visible to the unaided eye. ‘You think that’s the only thing that’s in the sky until you come here …!’ he said.
Canon Collective photographers being introduced to astronomy by John Sarkissian (in the hat mid-left) at the Cookamidgera site while waiting for the sun to set. Also present are a couple of the CWAS hosts, Eileen and Christine (far left front row). Credit: Merrill Findlay, 8 January 2016.
Mira from Brisbane was blown out by what she called ‘the depth’ of the stars visible from Cookamidgera, and the difference between what she could see with and without her camera. ‘Like the Milky Way, when we look at the sky we just see like a little trail, but in the camera … it was like there were heaps and heaps of stars and there was even a variation in the colour which was also very beautiful,’ she enthused.
This was her first attempt at astro-photography. ‘I was so impressed with myself,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I’ve got a lot to learn, but it was a great starting point. It has developed an interest for me, actually, in astronomy …’
I met up again with Gerry, Mira, and the other Canon photographers at the Parkes Observatory before dawn the following Sunday. They were there to catch the first rays of sunlight illuminating CSIRO’s 64-metre radio telescope known, since 2020, as Murriyang. I was more interested in the conjunction of Venus and Saturn, however. From the Visitors Centre lawn, these two planets seemed so close to the dish they could almost have waltzed together around its rim. I clicked twice and went looking for a better angle … and then a mechanical whir in the pre-dawn darkness and the dish began to move.
Oh no, no, please don’t …
But it did. And Saturn and Venus were imprisoned behind the mesh of the telescope’s parabolic reflector!
The conjunction of Saturn and Venus just visible in the dawn sky to the right of The Dish. Credit: Merrill Findlay. Taken with my very amateur little Pentax X5 on Auto and without a tripod before the dish moved!
So who was sabotaging my efforts to record this planetary conjunction at the dish’s lip, and why?
I’ll tell you soon enough, even introduce you to the culprit, who, I’ve since learned, was driving this iconic instrument to observe pulsars from his Mum’s kitchen table in Warsaw! But first, let’s get to know Amy and her fellow photographers a little better.
Canon Collective photographers at The Dish post-sunrise, Sunday 10 January 2016. Credit: Merrill Findlay.
Amy was conspicuous that morning, the only photographer in pearls and black lace before sunrise! She’d dressed for her next gig, she explained, which, judging from her frock, must have been either a rock’n roll fling around a dance floor or a champagne breakfast with someone nice. (Or both.) She’d ‘done everything’ at the Elvis Festival, she boasted. Even sung Bosa Nova Baby solo at the Poets’ Breakfast because no-one else knew the words! Ever since, people had been stopping her in the main street saying ‘I remember you, you’re the girl who …’
But, for Amy, the Festival’s highlight was not the rockabilly rock’n roll nostalgia, nor the street parade dress-ups, nor even Donny Edwards impersonating Elvis at the Leagues Club. It was this place, the Parkes Observatory. Because Amy wanted to be a professional astronomer and had just completed her first year of a physics degree as a step towards this goal. Her Plan B, for in case the maths beat her, was to become an astro-science communicator to inspire others to look up to the sky and be amazed.
Amy, the aspiring astrophysicist (and/or science communicator), at the control board inside the telescope tower. Credit: Merrill Findlay, 10 January 2016.
Amy herself had been interested in astronomy for as long as she could remember. Yet, when she left school, studying it hadn’t seemed an option. ‘I don’t have enough nerds in my life!’ she quipped to explain why she hadn’t gone to uni earlier. Instead, she got a job with a fast food franchise and stayed … until, one day, five years later, she’d simply had enough! She went home and spent the night applying for jobs. Any job anywhere. She eventually accepted an offer of a housekeeping position at an eco-lodge on Tasmania’s isolated Freycinet Peninsula.
As one of the great science communicators of the twentieth century, Carl Sagan, famously told us, ‘We are made of star stuff.’ For Amy, as for many of us, this is both a scientific and a spiritual truth, and deeply comforting in the most inclusive way possible.
For some reason she didn’t take her telescope to Tasmania, and regretted it as soon as she saw the unpolluted night sky in all its southern glory. She went shopping, busted her budget, and spent her free nights stargazing with a friend from the end of the local jetty: two millennials tripping the light fantastic along the Milky Way from a remote promontory on a small green island on a small blue planet orbiting a small sun in a minor spur of just one of a hundred thousand galaxies in the cosmic supercluster we now know as Laniakea, in our own ever-expanding universe.
And then, one day someone asked a simple question: ‘Why don’t you study astronomy if you love it so much?’
Sometimes that’s all it takes ….
Astronomy made her feel connected to the universe, Amy told me over breakfast at The Dish cafe later that morning. Because, in her cosmology, the very elements we are made of have been cooked in the bellies of the stars she gazes at through her telescope. As one of the great science communicators of the twentieth century, Carl Sagan, famously told us, ‘We are made of star stuff.’ For Amy, as for many of us, this is both a scientific and a spiritual truth, and deeply comforting in the most inclusive way possible.
The eastern horizon was glowing by now. Magpies were chortling, apostle birds and choughs were stalking the lawn in search of breakfast, and a mob of gallahs was noisily preparing to land on the Dish’s rim. ‘Four minutes to sunrise,’ John Sarkissian, the Observatory’s Operations Scientist and CWAS member, announced, and began the countdown. The photographers positioned themselves behind their tripods and checked their camera settings.
Three minutes, two minutes, one, give it an extra minute to climb Hervey Range—and then the burst of golden light from our nearest star.
Visiting photographers catching the sunrise with CWAS’s John Sarkissian (second from right), Sunday 10 January 2016. Credit: Merrill Findlay.
As if all these conjunctions weren’t enough for a single Sunday morning—Elvis, Venus, Saturn, the rising sun, and those millisecond pulsars we’ll learn more about shortly—another event of cosmic consequence, at least to some of us, was occurring that day: David Bowie was dying. The Starman, who had inspired millions to think beyond the banalities of our everyday lives on Planet Earth and dare to be different. (He also happened to be married to the woman who played the cigar-smoking chameloid, Martia, in Star Trek VI: Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid. Another cosmic conjunction, but too much of a digression for this story!)
At the Parkes Observatory, we didn’t know of Bowie’s passing yet, so, instead of sorrowing, as some of us would do later that day, we milled around Laurie Crawley’s optical ‘scope to witness Venus in her gibbous phase (or Viva Las Vegas, as this planet was renamed for the Elvis Festival). For at least one visitor, Kirsty Bede, Canon Australia’s national consumer experience manager and the person responsible for bringing the city photographers to Parkes, seeing Venus that morning, and listening to Laurie and John talking about the cosmos with such passion, was the highlight of her entire Elvis Festival! Astronomy can do that to people: it can induce far greater awe, wonder, fascination, curiosity and delight than the musical charisma of a dead mega-star ever can!
Amy at the annual Friends of The Dish public sky viewing on the lawn of Parkes Observatory’s Visitors Centre. This Elvis Festival event was co-hosted by CWAS members Laurie Crawley, Denis Crute, Christine Speers, Bernadette Aiken, Peter Cannon and John Sarkissian. More than 2,000 people visited the telescope that day. Many of them saw ‘Viva Las Venus’ (aka Planet Venus), ‘Elvis Centauri’ (Alpha Centauri) and ‘A Hunk of Burning Love’ (the Sun) up close for the first time. Credit: Merrill Findlay, 10 January 2016.
The city folk headed home after Viva Las Venus, all except Amy, our aspiring astrophysicist. Because she wanted to look inside the Observatory tower, something she’d dreamed of doing since first seeing the Australian comedy The Dish. John Sarkissian offered her a personalised tour while we waited for the Centre’s café to open for breakfast. I tagged along.
Amy with the poster promoting her favourite film inside the Parkes Observatory’s admin. building. Credit: Merrill Findlay, 10 January 2016.
John had shown thousands of visitors through the tower, but rarely, I suspect, had his spiel been interrupted so many times for photos. Amy needed a digital memory of herself in every setting featured in The Dish for her socials: Amy gazing across Coobang Valley from the azimuth track loggia, Amy in the observation room, Amy at a CSIRO computer, Amy at the control board, Amy in the kitchen, Amy on John Bolton Avenue, as the tree-lined road the film’s characters used is now called … In this, she was a typical Millennial!
But the most famous setting of all, the great parabolic reflector on which the film’s characters played their game of cricket, was off-limits. Why? Because, as I learned later, Dr Stefan Oslowski, the young astrophysicist who sabotaged my shot of Venus and Saturn dancing on the telescope’s rim, was monitoring an array of millisecond pulsars, or neutron stars, yes, with his laptop on his Mum’s kitchen table in Warsaw! He and his Parkes Pulsar colleagues were using these pulsars to try to detect evidence of gravitational waves caused by colliding supermassive black holes millions of light years away!
Millisecond pulsars, neutron stars, supermassive black holes, gravitational waves … these descriptors slip so lightly from astrophysicists’ tongues, but the cosmic forces they signify, the magnitude of their existence, are so mind-bogglingly extreme, so absolutely beyond human lived experience, and so unimaginably far away that, for most of us, they remain incomprehensible abstractions. As a non-scientist, I really struggle to get my head around even the most basic of concepts astrophysicists so blithely toss around in their professional lives.
So I googled Dr Oslowski and read some of his scientific papers. At the time of writing, he was the Humboldt Research Fellow at Bielefeld University’s Physics Faculty, and a guest post-doctoral researcher at Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy. Exactly the kind of ‘nerd’ Amy needed in her youth to nudge her towards university instead of a job at Subway when she left school! I emailed him and invited him to explain what he was doing with the Parkes Radio Telescope on that Elvis weekend! And why!
We connected by Skype the following week, he from in his office in North Rhine-Wesphalia, Germany, and me from my office in Forbes, a small country town near Parkes, Australia.
Astrophysicist Dr Stefan Oslowski as he appeared on my iPad during our Skype conversation. Credit: Merrill Findlay, 26 January, 2016.
Even though Stefan was born and raised in Poland and had lived most of his life in Europe, he had spent many weeks at the Parkes Observatory while completing his PhD at Swinburne University of Technology’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, in Melbourne. Like many other visiting astrophysicists, he sometimes felt very isolated at the Parkes Observatory, notwithstanding his collegiality with other astronomers and support staff, and his direct video link with Swinburne University, he told me. For a city lad who had grown up with all the cultural sophistications of Central Europe, there really wasn’t much to do in inland rural New South Wales between his 12 hour observation shifts – except to read, sleep, and visit The Dish café for coffee or something stronger. And/or to watch the kangaroos! He recalled one Christmas, for example, when all the support staff were at home with their families and he and his colleague were the only two people on-site. A very lonely time.
Yet, having to be physically at the Observatory was also advantageous in many ways. For Stefan it meant that he was able to learn many practical skills about operating radio telescopes from more experienced astrophysicists and support staff, opportunities which are rarely available to young astronomers now that CSIRO’s telescopes can be driven remotely.
Pulsars, the objects Stefan observes with the Parkes telescope, are the corpses of neutron stars which have exploded as supernovae. They are remarkably dense and very small: ‘only 20 kilometres in diameter, the size of a city, but … heavier than our sun,’ Stefan explained. They also spin at seemingly impossibly fast rates like the blade of a kitchen blender, and emit a constant stream of electro-magnetic radiation from their magnetic poles.
Pulse profile of PSR J1603-7202, one of the pulsars Dr Stefan Oslowski was monitoring over the Elvis Festival weekend, as it appeared on the computer screen in the Parkes Observatory tower. This pulsar spins at the rate of 67 times a second, with a time interval between each pulse (its period), of just 0.0148419520154668 seconds. Its period is also remarkably stable, increasing by just 0.0000005 seconds every million years. See CSIRO’s Introduction to Pulsars for more. Photo credit: Merrill Findlay, 10 January 2016.
With every rotation, these beams sweep across our planet like search lights. They are so regular that, when Jocelyn Bell (now Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell), discovered the first pulsar in 1967, as a graduate student at Cambridge University’s Interplanetary Scintillation Array, she nick-named it LGM-1, for Little Green Men. Because, as she and her colleagues joked, its astonishingly regular pulses might have been made by extra-terrestrials trying to communicate with other intelligent beings in the universe. LGM-1 is now more prosaically known as CP 1919 or PSR B1919+21. You can listen to it here.
The detection of this first pulsar was announced in the science journal Nature in February 1968, and has since been described as ‘the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century’. In one of science’s many gender scandals, however, it was Jocelyn Bell’s male PhD supervisor, Antony Hewish, who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics for what the Nobel Foundation called ‘his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars’. Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s name was not mentioned. You can read her own entertaining account of her discovery here.
What do supernovae and pulsars look like optically? This photo shows the supernova remnant in the constellation Vela, and emissions created by ‘winds’ from the Vela pulsar PSR B8033-45 at its centre. Credits: Australia Telescope Compact Array 21 cm continuum image by D. Bock, R.Sault, A.Green and D. Milne. Courtesy CSIRO’s ATNF radio image archive
Telescope driver Dennis Gill in Parkes Observatory’s old control room around the time the first pulsars were detected in 1968. Dennis was also one of two drivers controlling the telescope during the Apollo 11 mission the following year. This image is pinned to a notice board in the tower as a material memory of the telescope’s past. Credits: Original photographer unknown. This image by Merrill Findlay, 10 January 2016.
In 1968, PSR B 1919 also became the first pulsar detected with the Parkes radio telescope. Bill Butler, the dish’s ‘driver’ at the time, recalled that engineer Brian Cooper remained on duty after his colleagues knocked off, and was ‘wandering around, as he usually did, muttering and kicking things, twisting knobs etc. and he saw it, the first pulsar observation at Parkes.’
I read this description over the phone to Brian Cooper’s daughter, Sue, who happens to be an old friend of mine. ‘That’d be right!’ she laughed. Her dad passed away in 1999, but she could well imagine him ‘muttering and kicking things’ and ‘twisting knobs’ in his determination to pick up PSR B1919’s faint signal!
Since then, more than half of all known pulsars have been discovered from the Parkes Observatory, including J0437-4715, the binary millisecond pulsar Stefan Oslowski researched for his doctoral dissertation. Between 1997 and 2003, for example, data from the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey of the southern sky revealed 760 new pulsars amongst the 1,015 it identified, including a completely new class of pulsars now known as Rotating Radio Transients, or RRATs.
As the accompanying graph comparing pulsar discoveries around the world shows, Parkes Observatory’s contribution to this field of astronomy cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately, pulsar research doesn’t carry the same media charisma as astronauts and moon landings, so it is the telescope’s role in the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that has captured people’s imagination rather than the more scientifically significant achievements astrophysicists have made with this remarkable instrument.
Plot of pulsar discoveries by year for Parkes Observatory and the rest of the world. Blue represents the Parkes discoveries. Source: ATNF Pulsar Catalogue (C1:53), R.N.Manchester, Pulsar Group, CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science.
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) team has been monitoring selected millisecond pulsars every few weeks for more than a decade now to detect direct evidence of gravitational waves. So far this evidence has eluded them. But Stefan and his PPTA colleagues remain confident that, as their methods become more and more sensitive, they will find what they were looking for.
‘We believe that when two galaxies collide and merge, then the supermassive black holes at the cores of the galaxies will start orbiting one another … and basically, as they get close enough to one another … they start emitting gravitational waves …, as predicted by Einstein and many other theorists of gravity,’ he explained during our Skype conversation. ‘These are the gravitational waves we’re trying to detect.’
Many rumours were circulating on social media and in the press at that time about a possible detection of these ripples in the fabric of space-time by a completely different kind of telescope, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO, in the US. So were Stefan and his pulsar colleagues feeling pressured by this competition, I asked.
‘I guess they have a much higher chance than we do to be the first ones,’ he admitted.
The Advanced LIGO experiment was very different yet complementary to what the PPTA collaborators and other pulsar timing array teams were trying to do though. ‘So while it would be nice to be the first ones …, even if they detect something and we haven’t detected anything yet, we’re certainly not going to stop, because we have different objectives with our experiment,’ he said. ‘I will be very cautious about saying whether we’ll detect anything this year, but if we do, then that’s fantastic!’
Those rumours persisted. Had LIGO truly detected a gravitational wave? I waited.
And then finally, a month after that Elvis sunrise at the Parkes Observatory, the rumours were confirmed: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves,’ LIGO’s executive director David Reitze told the world. ‘We did it!’
This extraordinary achievement was brought to fulfillment over many years of research and development and the collaborative effort of more than 1,000 scientists in 16 countries, including Australia. Together, they detected a ripple from the merger of two supermassive black holes more than a billion light years away using a couple of four kilometre pipelines, two highly polished mirrors, some exquisite science and engineering, some very serious computer kit, and lots of financial support. Their work has given birth to a radically new kind of astronomy, and to revolutionary new ways of understanding our universe.
I contacted Stefan again after this historic announcement. He seemed exhilarated by it. ‘The direct detection of gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO is a magnificent achievement, opening a completely new window on the Universe,’ he told me by email.
‘We will now be able to see many parts of the Universe that were hidden so far from us. Many results in fundamental physics based on this and next detections by LIGO should follow.’
And his own work with pulsars?
‘I think the field of gravitational wave astronomy will be strongly invigorated due to this first detection, regardless of the type of experiment involved,’ he said. ‘We will continue working to get the first detection of gravitational waves from supermassive black holes using pulsar timing arrays and look forward to a space-borne laser interferometer, eLISA, which will probe yet another part of the brand new window on the Universe.’
But what will all this mean for the Parkes Observatory and its pulsar timing array project? What will it mean for Stefan himself, and other young astrophysicists who are at the beginnings of their careers in pulsar science? And for Amy, who, I expect, has now commenced the second year of her undergraduate degree in physics with big dreams of becoming an astrophysicist herself? What will this discovery mean for her?
Oh to be a twenty-something at a time such as this! Imagine!
Frank and Ernest on a wall inside the control room of the Parkes Observatory tower! Can anyone tell us who cut it out of the newspaper and stuck it on the wall, and when? Credit: Merrill Findlay, 10 January 2016.
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This story has a long history. It was first published on bigskiescollaboration.wordpress.com on 16 February 2016. Revised 17 February 2016, after John Sarkissian identified the pulse profile in one of the photos and told me the name of the person in the historic photo of the Observatory’s old control room. Thank you John. Revised again 18 February 2016 after Stefan Oslowski got back to me with his comments on the Advanced LIGO announcement, which I have now inserted. Stefan also asked me to make a few minor corrections about his own work and the nature of pulsars. Thank you Stefan. Revised again 19 February 2016 with a few very minor aesthetic changes, and again on 23 February and 4 March that year to address concerns Amy had about her biographical details. Touched up again on 7 January 2017. Re-posted on inlandastrotrail.com on 10 December 2024 with a few minor changes, and a few more edits and reformatting by the author on 1 August 2024 and again on 16 October and 25 October 2024. Last revised 22 September, 2025.
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Page published 10 December 2023. Last updated 24 April 2025