ALMA dish and the setting Orion Nebula

The ALMA array consists of 66 parabolic radio antennas located in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The array helps astronomers study some of the coldest objects in our Universe. The 12-metre diameter antennas have a height of 14.7 metre. Although ALMA does not look like a traditional telescope, the large dishes play the role of a mirror does with an optical telescope. It collects radiation coming from distance astronomical objects and then focuses it into a detector that measures the radiation.