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by gonzus 1032 days ago
TIL that the concave dish surface was actually spherical and not paraboloidal, as I had always assumed.
1 comments

The main dish is fixed, they move(d) the receiver around to steer it, with a paraboloidal dish that would not work (because the focal point would be fixed).
Did they apply any corrections for the spherical aberration?
Yes. Initially the receivers had very long linear feeds, because a spherical mirror focuses to a line, not a point. Later additional mirrors were added to partially correct for spherical aberration.