Well for me there was only one place to go in Carnavon, and I didn’t even know it existed until we pulled up to the caravan park right in front of a massive telescope/dish. I was very excited.
As I am both a nerd and a huge fan of the movie “the Dish” which was made about the large dish in Parkes NSW where they received images from Apollo 11 for the TV broadcast of the moon landing in 1969. I googled it straight away and found that it was also an integral part of the NASA space program, and also houses the Carnarvon Space and Technology Museum.
The Carnarvon (or NASA) Tracking Station contains a number of “dishes” that were used for communication (as opposed to images) – one of these facilitated the first TV broadcast from Australia to the BBC in London. It was also used to relay the images of the Apollo 11 landing from Moree earth station in NSW to be televised into Western Australia. In 1969 the steerable dish, named the OTC dish was built to facilitate better communication between the NASA Tracking Station and the USA. The tracking station was in use for 11 years, it was the last station to communicate with the space capsules leaving the earth’s orbit and the last to make contact before splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. It supported NASA’s Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programs.
After it was decommissioned, the museum was assembled over the next few years. Phase one of the museum was officially opened by retired astronaut Buzz Aldrin in 2012.
OK, enough nerdy stuff. After all this excitement we continued on to Denham and Monkey Mia, the latter is famous for its “swimming with the dolphins”. Nowadays it’s more “watching the dolphins as other people feed them very little” which is great for their conservation as they were becoming dependent on humans for food. They were also neglecting their babies, and if they survived they were not taught to hunt for their own fish.
We also drove to Francois Peron National Park for a look around the beaches and surprisingly found a hot tub containing natural spring water that was 40 degrees.
Have a look at all of this –> https://youtu.be/3x8jIL5pG2o