Watching those first small steps on the moon

Six hundred million people sat in front of their televisions, waiting for the big moment — but what very few knew is that the pictures of Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon were coming from the middle of a field in Australia.

They were delivered by a 64-metre radio telescope at an observatory near the small town of Parkes in New South Wales. The Parkes Observatory was built in 1961 to listen to the stars, but in early 1969 NASA asked it to receive signals from Apollo 11 and send them to mission control in Houston.

As the people of Parkes prepare to mark the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, they still remember the excitement of 20 July 1969. "We'd been preparing for weeks," Neil "Fox" Mason, who operated the telescope on that historic day, told The Independent. Parkes's pictures were far better than those from NASA's tracking station in Goldstone, California, and the Australian images were sent around the world for most of the two-and-a-half-hour broadcast. After Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon, David Cooke, the observatory's senior engineer, went outside and looked up at the stars. "The moon was still in the sky and I thought, 'Gosh! There are people up there, and we've helped to do that.'"