These Government Photos Were Top Secret – Until Recently

Heaven’s Eye

This massive thing is the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, otherwise known as FAST, otherwise nicknamed Tianyan (Heaven’s Eye) in Mandarin. So what is this thing exactly? Well, it’s a radio telescope that’s located in southwest China that’s used to detect all kinds of radio signals from across the Milky Way galaxy, even as far as a thousand light-years away. It’s also the biggest filled-aperture radio telescope in the world! Construction of FAST began in 2011, and it was declared fully operational in January 2020.