A thread: I wanted to give you a sense of what a great telescope she was, so here's my Arecibo radio telescope: a guided tour. First, this is the focus cabin, where the radio waves reflected into. Housed inside were several receivers to gather the waves -> electrical signals. 
Here's a view inside the focus cabin, where we were uncovering one of the receivers and putting it into place to observe hydrogen from our Milky Way.
This is an Australian-made receiver, which had a little stuffed kangaroo on top, holding a little Australian flag.
To get up into the focus cabin (VERY HIGH UP) you had to go in this little lift. I did this at midnight, and it was dark and scary and fun.
This is the view down onto the @NAICobservatory telescope dish from above at night. Beautiful.
The observatory is in the middle of the countryside, and I stayed for 2 weeks to observe every night. I stayed on site in this beautiful (if simple) little wooden hut. The frogs croaked all night and the sounds of the forest were intense.
The accommodation was basic, but the internet was fast for rural Puerto Rico! That was needed for data transport, etc.
It was hard to get a photo of the whole structure, since it was so big. The 305m diameter dish was nestled in a natural depression in the landscape. Here you can see one of the pylons that held cables that kept the receiver cabin in place
The dish itself was a mesh of wire. Here is a view from underneath.
Here's me, aged 27 and barely believing that I'm lucky enough to be observing at @NAICobservatory.
Inside the control room, it was a mass of computers and controllers. There were duty staff to make sure we visiting astronomers didn't break anything! (very wise).
Night observing meant LOTS of tea, coffee and snacks, whilst watching monitors and looking through data to make sure everything was going well. We also had great scientific discussions at this time.
Here's some of the sort of hardware (and older consoles in the background) that you expect to deal with in radio telescopes. It looks complicated but you generally don't need to fiddle with it too much.
Monitors show us time/date, sky position, frequency, weather, health of the telescope, atmospheric conditions, state of the electronics and a lot more. If you like staring at computers, become an observational astronomer!
Thank you for your service @NAICobservatory - and I'm so sorry it had to end like this.
If you want to read more about my time at @NAICobservatory I wrote about it in my first book When Galaxies Collide. lisaharveysmith.com
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