Which Australian radio telescope helped receive Apollo 11 moonwalk television pictures?

The Australian radio telescope that helped receive Apollo 11 moonwalk television pictures was Parkes Observatory.

Located near Parkes in New South Wales, the observatory operates the 64-metre Parkes Radio Telescope, now also known as Murriyang. During Apollo 11, its enormous dish received the slow-scan television signal transmitted from the lunar module Eagle. The signal had to be converted into a format suitable for ordinary broadcast television before it could reach viewers worldwide.

Parkes was not the only station involved. NASA also received the lunar television signal through the 64-metre Goldstone antenna in California and the 26-metre Honeysuckle Creek antenna near Canberra. Honeysuckle Creek carried the earliest pictures of Neil Armstrong’s first steps because the Moon had not yet risen high enough for Parkes’s main receiver.

Once the Moon rose into Parkes’s view, the observatory supplied pictures of superior quality, and NASA used the Parkes feed for most of the remaining 2.5-hour moonwalk broadcast. Strong winds exceeding 100 kilometres per hour made the operation especially challenging. The observatory’s Apollo role later inspired the fictionalized 2000 film The Dish.