Leighton Radio Telescopes

The Leighton Radio Telescopes are 10.4 meter parabolic dish antennas designed by Robert B. Leighton in the 1970s, which were fabricated on the Caltech campus during the 1970s and 1980s. The telescope surfaces reached an accuracy of 10 microns RMS, allowing observations throughout the millimeter and submillimeter bands. In all, eight of these telescopes were made. They were used as the six elements of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) millimeter interferometer in California, and as single telescopes at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii and the Raman Research Institute (RRI) at Bangalore, India. In the spring of 2005, the six Leighton telescopes in Owens Valley were moved^[1] to a high mountain site in the White Mountains to form the core of the CARMA array of 25 telescopes. The CARMA array was decommissioned in 2015 at which time the Leighton telescopes were moved back to OVRO, where they are now being repurposed for different projects including the CO Mapping Array Pathfinder (COMAP)^[2] (a 19 pixel imaging array), the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), and various transient detection projects.