Leighton Radio Telescopes

The telescope surfaces reached an accuracy of 10 microns RMS, allowing observations throughout the millimeter and submillimeter bands.

In 1973 Robert Leighton proposed to the NSF to build four 10.4 meter diameter parabolic dish radio antennas.

There is a cable wrap for signal and power wiring which rides atop the azimuth thrust bearing.

The sidecab also houses electronics for the axis encoders, LO & IF systems and tiltmeters along with the antenna control computer.

The telescope has an effective focal ratio of 12.4 at the Cassegrain focus, which is located at the point of intersection of the azimuth and elevations axes.

The panel that would have tiled the center of the dish is absent, providing the hole required for Cassegrain and Nasmyth foci.

A unique feature of the Leighton telescopes is that the primary is fabricated as a single 10.4 m diameter precision surface, rather than individually machined panels.

[5] The space frame is fabricated from steel tubes less than 1.5 m long that have holes on each end for inserting dowel pins.

The precision dowel pin joint also made it possible to perform accurate finite element analysis (FEA) using the computers available in the 1970s.

This is a critical part of the success of assembling the primary reflector onto the tipping platform and has been exploited when moving the telescopes to CARMA high mountain site and back to the valley.

Five of the six OVRO antennas were funded by the NSF, and the Kenneth and Eileen Norris Foundation paid for the sixth, which was dedicated in 1996.

In 2005 these six telescopes were moved to the Cedar Flat in the Inyo Mountains of California, and added to the CARMA array.

The CARMA array ceased operation in 2015, and the six Leighton telescopes were moved back to OVRO for storage.

The Leighton telescope with the most accurate (10 micron RMS) surface was shipped to Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and became the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory.