What It Was Like To Work At Arecibo

As posted yesterday, the receiver platform at the Arecibo Observatory has collapsed, destroying any hopes that somehow the observatory could be saved.

On Twitter, Professor Lisa Harvey Smith, an astrophysicist who has worked at Arecibo, posted a thread about what it was like to work there and included several pictures of the observatory from an astronomer's perspective. 

It's interesting reading and makes me very sad that we have lost such an important tool for understanding the universe. 

A thread: I wanted to give you a sense of what a great telescope she was, so here's my Arecibo radio telescope: a guided tour. First, this is the focus cabin, where the radio waves reflected into. Housed inside were several receivers to gather the waves -> electrical signals.

Here's a view inside the focus cabin, where we were uncovering one of the receivers and putting it into place to observe hydrogen from our Milky Way.