JOSEPH DE CA'TH LON VISITS ARECIBO IN PUERTO RICO

Joseph de Ca'th Lon in Arecibo, Puerto Rico

The Arecibo Observatory is a radio telescope in the municipality of Arecibo, Puerto Rico. This observatory is operated by SRI International, USRA and UMET, under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

The observatory is the sole facility of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC), which refers to the observatory, and the staff that operates it. From its construction in the 1960s until 2011, the observatory was managed by Cornell University.

The observatory's 305-metre radio telescope was the largest single-aperture telescope from its completion in 1963 until July 2016 when the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope was completed. It is used in three major areas of research: radio astronomy, atmospheric science, and radar astronomy. Scientists who want to use the observatory submit proposals that are evaluated by an independent scientific board.

More information:  Arecibo Observatory

The observatory has appeared in film, gaming and television productions, gaining more recognition in 1999 when it began to collect data for the SETI@home project. It has been listed on the American National Register of Historic Places starting in 2008.

In 1974, the Arecibo Message, an attempt to communicate with potential extraterrestrial life, was transmitted from the radio telescope toward the globular cluster Messier 13, about 25,000 light-years away.  The 1,679 bit pattern of 1s and 0s defined a 23 by 73 pixel bitmap image that included numbers, stick figures, chemical formulas and a crude image of the telescope.

Arecibo is the source of data for the SETI@home and Astropulse distributed computing projects put forward by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and was used for the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix observations. The Einstein@Home distributed computing project has found more than 20 pulsars in Arecibo data.

Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a program to search for extraterrestrial life or advanced technologies. SETI aims to answer the question Are we alone in the Universe? by scanning the skies for transmissions from intelligent civilizations elsewhere in our galaxy. In comparison, METI, Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, refers to the active search by transmitting messages.

More information: SETI Institute

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. 

Try to make sense of  what you see, 

and wonder about what makes the universe exist. 
Be curious. 

Stephen Hawking