Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory

What we offer

• John A. Galt Telescope: a 26-m diameter, prime-focus, equatorially mounted telescope with interchangeable feeds that operate from 0.4 to 7 GHz.
• Synthesis Telescope: a 7-element array of 9-m telescopes that offers wide-field continuum imaging simultaneously at 408 MHz and 1420 MHz, as well as atomic hydrogen (HI) spectroscopy across 256 channels at 1420 MHz. It is particularly suited to studying the gas and plasma that lies between the stars, i.e. the interstellar medium, of both the Milky Way and nearby galaxies.
• Solar Radio Flux Monitoring: a fully automated solar weather monitoring facility that provides "space weather" data for many scientific and commercial activities at both industrial organizations and government agencies around the world. The primary data product is one of the most widely used indicators of solar activity and is known internationally as the 10.7cm solar radio flux, or F10.7. A next-generation solar flux monitor (NGSFM) has just been completed in collaboration with Natural Resources Canada and the Canadian Space Agency. The NGSFM is designed to provide the solar flux at five additional wavelengths, providing greater insight into the processes underlying solar storms and other solar phenomena that impact the Earth.
• Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME): Canada's largest radio telescope, CHIME is a collaboration between the University of British Columbia, McGill University and the University of Toronto. Collecting radio emissions from the Universe between 400 and 800 MHz, it is designed to survey atomic hydrogen from the largest volume of the Universe to date. This novel telescope, with no moving parts, is composed of four 100-metre by 20-metre cylinders with an array of 128 radio receivers along each focus, leading to 2048 inputs into the high-power digital data processor system. CHIME will map the whole sky visible overhead every day.

The site also hosts instruments from other institutes that require a radio-quiet environment.

Access and use

DRAO has been at the centre of more than 50 years of outstanding achievement in astronomical sciences and technology development. This includes the ground-breaking Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) technique that telescopes at DRAO and the Algonquin Observatory in Ontario used to produce observations similar resolution (i.e. level of detail) that a single radio telescope thousands of kilometres across might achieve. More recently, the 26-m Telescope and Synthesis Telescope were the primary sources of data for the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey (CGPS) that was observed between 1995 and 2009.

Major technology development projects have included the ACSIS spectrometer built for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii, USA and the WIDAR correlator for the Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) in New Mexico, USA, currently the largest operating radio telescope in the world. DRAO is currently working on novel technologies for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), including composite telescope construction, phased-array feed and receiver systems, low-noise amplifiers, and digital signal processing hardware and software.

• Apply for DRAO observing time

Visitor information

The Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory site is open for self-guided tours year round, Monday to Friday, from 10 am to 5 pm.

From Easter long weekend to Thanksgiving weekend the site is open weekends and statutory holidays from 10 am to 5 pm for guided tours. Special tours led by Observatory staff are offered July and August, Sundays only, from 2 pm to 5 pm.

Reservations are not required and these tours are free of charge.