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The Allen Telescope Array refers to a project which is a joint venture of the Institute for the Search of Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (
SETI) and the Radio Astronomy Lab at UC Berkeley (RAL). The actual location of the telescope is at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, which is located in Shasta County in California.
Interestingly, this project was previously known as the One Hectare Telescope, or the 1hT. Hectare is a large unit of area, and the project was so named because it was supposed to be built from hundreds of smaller telescopes which would prove much more cost effective than a single large telescope. To put it in the words of John Dreher of the RAL, the 1hT was a “large but low-cost array of small, fully-steerable parabolic antennas with a total area of 104 m2. 300 to 1000 elements, each 3.5 to 8 meters in diameter” (2000).
One more important item of mention is that the project's name was changed to Allen Telescope, from One Hectare Telescope, in honour of Paul Gardner Allen, who is the co-founder of Microsoft and donated a huge sum of money for the cause of this extra terrestrial effort.