[8] In September 2006, the telescope won the BBC's online competition to find the UK's greatest "Unsung Landmark".

If the air is clear enough, the Mark I telescope can be seen from high-rise buildings in Manchester such as the Beetham Tower, and from as far away as the Pennines, Winter Hill in Lancashire, Snowdonia, Beeston Castle in Cheshire, and the Peak District.

[27] However, the movable tower was never built, jointly because of funding constraints and the fact that much of the receiver equipment was placed at the base of the telescope rather than at the focus.

[27] Instead, receivers were mounted on 50-foot (15-m) long steel tubes, which were then inserted by a winch into the top of the aerial tower while the bowl was inverted.

The cables from the receivers then ran down the inside of this tube, which could then be connected when the telescope was pointed at the zenith.

Associated receiver equipment could then be placed either in the small, swinging laboratory directly underneath the surface; in rooms at the tops of the two towers; at the base girders, or in the control building.

[30] By the end of July the dish surface was completed,[31] and first light was on 2 August 1957; the telescope did a drift scan across the Milky Way at 160 MHz, with the bowl at the zenith.

[16] The government increased its share of the funding several times as the cost of the telescope rose; other money came from private donations.

The appearance of fatigue cracks was the first of these problems that threatened to stop the telescope working; had they not been put right the elevation system could have failed and perhaps jammed.

[43][44] In January 1972 the hoist carrying two engineers to the central antenna broke, gravely injuring one and killing the other.

[45] The Mark IA upgrade was formally completed on 16 July 1974, when the telescope was handed back to the University of Manchester.

[49] The presence (as at 2010) of two breeding pairs of wild peregrine falcons (nesting one in each of the telescope's two support towers) prevents the nuisance of pigeon infestation (by droppings fouling, and their body heat affecting sensitive instrument readings) that some other radio telescopes suffer from.

Close to one of the buildings at the observatory stands a bust of Nicolaus Copernicus,[50] Polish Renaissance-era mathematician and astronomer who developed the heliocentric model of the universe, with Sun, rather than the Earth, at its centre.

In February and March 1963, the telescope transmitted signals via the moon and Echo II, a NASA balloon satellite at 750 km (466 mi) altitude, to the Zimenki Observatory in the USSR.

[58] The Lovell Telescope was used to track both Soviet and American probes aimed at the Moon in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

[70][71] The telescope possibly detected signals from Venera 1, a Russian satellite en route to Venus, during 19–20 May 1961.

As a stopgap measure while RAF Fylingdales was being built, the telescope was on standby for "Project Verify" (also known by the codewords "Lothario" and "Changlin") between April 1962 and September 1963.

These included:[14] However, the actual observations made with the telescope differ from these original objectives, and are outlined in the following sections.

[80] The telescope was also used to receive messages bounced off the Moon (a "moonbounce") as part of the 50th anniversary First Move festival.

[84] In 1968, the telescope observed the coordinates of the recently discovered pulsar, confirming its existence and investigating the dispersion measure.

[93] The early investigation into the size and nature of quasars drove the development of interferometry techniques in the 1950s; the Lovell telescope had an advantage because of its large collecting area, meaning that it could make high-sensitivity interferometer measurements relatively quickly.

[94] Once construction of the Lovell telescope was complete, the broadside array was put on a steerable mount and the pair were used as a tracking radio interferometer.

[95] In the summer of 1961, a 25-foot (8-m) diameter paraboloid telescope was constructed (of aluminium tubing and mounted on the rotating structure of an old defence radar).

This telescope pair has been used to carry out survey work, and to determine the positions of faint radio objects.

[85] In 1980, it was used as part of the new MERLIN array[85] with a series of smaller radio telescopes controlled from Jodrell Bank.

[85] It has also been used in Very Long Baseline Interferometry, with telescopes across Europe (the European VLBI Network), giving a resolution of around 0.001 arcseconds.

[97] It is planned that the telescope will work as part of an interferometer with the Radioastron (Russian) and VLBI Space Observatory Programme (Japanese) orbital radio satellites, providing yet larger baselines and higher resolutions.

[102] In February 2005, astronomers using the Lovell Telescope discovered the galaxy VIRGOHI21 that appears to be made almost entirely of dark matter.