Places · Ground station
Canberra Deep Space Complex
The southern-hemisphere station, and the only one that can still talk to Voyager 2 — the spacecraft left the ecliptic heading south and has never come back into northern view.
- Where
- Tidbinbilla, Australia
- Coordinates
- 35.40°S 148.98°E
- Since
- 1965
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- cdscc.nasa.gov
The sky from here
The sky over this spot is zone 4 — suburban edge, Bortle 4–5, with a naked-eye limit around magnitude 5.7–6.5. The Milky Way is a faint band overhead and gone lower down. The sky is noticeably grey rather than black.
Against that sky 99 of the 110 Messier objects are straightforward in 10×50 binoculars and 100 in a 130mm, with 21 reachable by eye alone. The nearest sky of Bortle 2 or better lies about 30 km west of here.
The Sun drops far enough below the horizon here for full astronomical darkness on every night of the year — which is not true of anywhere much further from the equator.
The centre of the galaxy climbs to 84° at its best — high enough that the summer Milky Way is genuinely three-dimensional rather than a band low in the south. Of the 110 Messier objects, none are circumpolar and 8 never rise.
The sky here is kindest to Ptolemy's Cluster, Butterfly Cluster and Southern Pinwheel, each of which passes within a few degrees of overhead — an object at the zenith is being seen through the least air it will ever be seen through, and the difference against the same object low in the south is not subtle.
Against that, Owl Nebula, Spindle Galaxy and Bode's Galaxy never clear the horizon here at all. No amount of aperture or patience changes that; the only remedy is to travel.
Read at 35.40°S 148.98°E. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
Nearby
Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Canberra Deep Space Complex?
Everything north of declination +55°. From 35.4°S that is a cap 35° in radius centred on the north celestial pole, which is 9.2% of the whole celestial sphere. Nothing about the calendar or the aperture changes that — the cap is below the horizon at every hour of every night. Its mirror image, the same 9.2% around the south celestial pole, is circumpolar here and never goes down.
How many hours of true darkness does Canberra Deep Space Complex get?
11 hours 12 minutes on the best night, around 21 June, falling to 5 hours 51 minutes around 21 December. The measure is astronomical darkness — the Sun a full eighteen degrees under — not simply the hours between sunset and sunrise. Every night of the year gets there eventually, which is the quiet advantage of not being any further from the equator than this.
When is the Milky Way best from Canberra Deep Space Complex?
June and July, and the timing is the whole point. The core transits at midnight around 17 June everywhere, but at 35.4°S that is the depth of winter: the longest nights of the year, sitting underneath the galaxy at its highest. Northern sites get the same transit date during their shortest and least dark nights. It is the single biggest structural advantage a southern observatory has.
How far is Canberra Deep Space Complex from the other sites on this map?
The nearest is Murriyang — the Parkes dish, about 275 km to the north. The nearest other ground station is New Norcia ground station, 3,070 km to the west. These are straight-line distances over the surface, not driving distances, and in this part of the world the two can differ considerably.