The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by SL93 ( talk) 23:40, 25 December 2021 (UTC) reply

The 40 Foot Telescope

• ... that the 40 Foot Telescope (pictured) at Green Bank Observatory was the first fully automated telescope? Source: https://greenbankobservatory.org/science/telescopes/40-ft/Source: "World's First Automated Radio Telescope". National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Retrieved 25 December 2021.

• Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Parks (board game) (reused from Template:Did you know nominations/Kosmos 1408, which was ineligible as it ended up at WP:ITN)

Created by Mike Peel ( talk). Self-nominated at 19:11, 17 December 2021 (UTC). reply

• Nominated within three days of creation, and is about 2700 bytes, satisfying date and length criteria. The statement "...has since been in continuous use..." is not supported by the ref, which states it was "recommissioned in 1987" and mentions its various uses. (Aside: I'd prefer the use of anniversary for inanimate objects instead of birthday, but that's not a requirement for DYK.) Is there a reason 3C 405 was omitted from the list of sources in the science section? Although most of the sources are related to the subject in some way, there are third-party refs establishing notability. The image is included in the article, is on Commons, was originally published at View of Green Bank’s 40-foot telescope from the front, and is licenced as CC-BY-3.0 according to the site's media use policy. It looks fine at the scale required for DYK. Hook is suitably short and has a citation in the article. (However, ref 5 states "As far as we know, it was the first completely automated telescope.") QPQ completed. (I usually avoid reviewing articles using as QPQ a review for one of my articles, but I did not notice until I completed my review that this was the case.) Reusing the QPQ from a nomination that was invalidated or withdrawn is fine. Mind matrix 21:31, 17 December 2021 (UTC) reply
  • @ Mindmatrix: Thanks for the review! [1] states "It has been in continuous use since 1987." (in bold, just above the text). I've changed 'birthday' to 'anniversary'. Thanks for spotting that I'd missed 3C 405! Thanks. Mike Peel ( talk) 17:51, 18 December 2021 (UTC) reply
    • I scanned the text on that page three times and didn't think to look beside the image. (And it's in bold, too!) I've given this a tick, reiterating for the promoter that ref 5 states "as far as we know" in case it affects promotion. (To me, this appears to be a "just in case" disclaimer.) Mind matrix 20:22, 18 December 2021 (UTC) reply
      • @ Mindmatrix: Thanks! I did some additional checks about whether this was actually the first automated telescope, way back in 1962. The earliest elsewhere that I could find was 1965 with an optical telescope, and there's also Mark II (radio telescope) that was the first to be controlled with a digital computer (I had a DYK many years ago on this). There's also [2], which seems to very optical-centric and puts the start dates after the 40 foot. So I think that statement is OK - and if it's not, I'd love to hear about (and then write about) an earlier example! Thanks. Mike Peel ( talk) 20:57, 18 December 2021 (UTC) reply
• I added a secondary source to the hook above, and also put the source in the article. It's The National Radio Astronomy Observatory web site, which says the Green Bank Observatory telescope is, "World’s First Automated Radio Telescope" Hope this helps. — Maile ( talk) 22:58, 25 December 2021 (UTC) reply