I finally left Bosque del Apache and headed West towards friend in Phoenix. Way up in the New Mexico high country is this.
What is that? Well, it is the Very Large Array. From wikipedia:
“The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) is a centimeter-wavelength radio astronomyobservatory located in central New Mexico on the Plains of San Agustin, between the towns of Magdalena and Datil, ~50 miles (80 km) west of Socorro. The VLA comprises twenty-eight 25-meter radio telescopes (27 of which are operational while one is always rotating through maintenance) deployed in a Y-shaped array and all the equipment, instrumentation, and computing power to function as an interferometer. Each of the massive telescopes is mounted on double parallel railroad tracks, so the radius and density of the array can be transformed to adjust the balance between its angular resolution and its surface brightness sensitivity.[1] Astronomers using the VLA have made key observations of black holes and protoplanetary disks around young stars, discovered magnetic filaments and traced complex gas motions at the Milky Way’s center, probed the Universe’s cosmological parameters, and provided new knowledge about the physical mechanisms that produce radio emission.”
Each leg of the “Y” shaped is 21 kilmeters/13 miles long! A possible upgrade will add more antennas from up to 300 km away.
Pretty neat! A lot bigger than one I have previously seen back East somewhere…~Curtis in /\/ew /\/\exico! {!-{>
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