Radio telescopes only see from certain angles?

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It’s my understanding that radio telescopes can only see signals when they hit the dish within a certain range of angles. Is this true? How is the range calculate/what is it called?

In: Physics

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The reason it’s a dish is to channel a narrow region of the sky to the detector. Ideally the beam could be the width of the dish, but practically the pointing uncertainty is more like 0.005˚. The spec for new telescopes is more like 10^-4 ˚ .

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yea, they use highly directional antennas, you point it at what you want to look at. Just like a regular telescope, you point it at the stars and you don’t see your house because it doesn’t pick up light from that direction.

The range of angles that it picks up is called the beamwidth (with the beam pattern being the more detailed sensitivity vs angle graph)