4The real dish on The Dish

From Einstein on D4

While the quirky 2000 Australian film The Dish is set in the town of Parkes in New South Wales, it was actually filmed in Forbes, a few kilometres down the road, according to the Internet Movie Database. The reason was that Parkes had changed since the 1960s, the era in which the film is set, but Forbes still looked the same. of nutrients to the leaf and the production of chlorophyll.

All summer long, that chlorophyll had been the bully of the colour wheel, masking all other pigments. Carotene and xanthophylls, for instance, were always in the leaf, but in fall they get to show off their yellows and oranges. Think carrots.

For bright reds, though, we need to thank anthocyanins — which give apples and grapes their familiar ripe colours — and a slightly more complex process. As the chlorophyll departs, the concentration of sugar in the leaves of such trees as red maples and sumac increases dramatically. It’s the sugar that reacts to form anthocyanins. And the ideal recipe for creating anthocyanins and all those patriotic reds? Lots of sunlight (which kills chlorophyll), dry weather ( increasing the amount of sugar trapped in the leaf), and low, but not freezing, temperatures (also lethal for chlorophyll). — Kenneth Kidd Many sources trumpet the fact that the 64-metre radio telescope at Parkes was the first to receive images of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, and that’s the way the story is told in The Dish.

In fact, it was the second: A tracking station near Canberra received pictures from the moon landing a few seconds earlier. But that facility was in an even more remote area and has since been demolished, explaining why it was ignored in the film. — Peter Calamai