A day at the VLA.

[hank4elk]

Finally met up with fellow HTer & NM resident nueavo_eph & got a tour of the VLA(Very Large Array),an in depth private one. Way Cool!
Been by it thousands of times but never even checked the visitor center. I can look at it from a friends ranch. One of the remote stations is just over the hill from me,15mi..lol
Ephram met us @ the center & gave my neighbor & I a killer tour.Most of the technical stuff went right over my head,but I got the gist of everything he said. Met some staff,toured the main building & saw the supercomputer too. The dishes are just amazing in scale & design. The system has just undergone a huge upgrade & is beyond me on how much info goes so fast.Like thousands past what it was before.
Then we went for a climb.

One of the shots shows Pelona Mtn on the edge of the Plains of San Augustine.That's right above & next to Luera Pk where BF was hunting with Coery Jacobson on BF's vid. I've looked back down on these dishes from way up there too. And another the Datil Mtns with my friends ranch a speck in the distance. Glad it wasn't windy....lol

 

[hank4elk]

Luera & Pelona Mtn

 

[nuevo_eph]

Glad to have you out, Hank! The weather couldn't have been better and the views from the dishes are unbeatable.

 

[hank4elk]

Thank You Eph!
That was way cool.

 

[flyingvmt]

We drove by those labor day weekend every year all through college while going from Lubbock, TX to Datil on rock climbing trips. Now, I wish I would have stopped once to learn more about them......:/

 

[marksjeep]

Very cool. Thanks for sharing the pix!

 

[1_pointer]

Very neat! Thanks for sharing.

 

[jabber]

Very interesting. Always amazed by them when I drive by.

 

[archer wapiti]

Looks like an awesome tour! I've done the visitor center self tour. Still can't wrap my head around exactly how they can form an image from radio waves (if I'm remembering that correctly). Great pics!

 

[Festus]

Very cool!

 

[hank4elk]

Data.
Throw in some CG layers and you see the images. It can pick up stuff Hubble misses too,such as invisible gases or a blackhole. Put the 2 together & it can be mindblowing.
Looked at a video of a blackhole that is in a mini-nebula,in the middle of our galaxy. No one knew it was there really cause they could see there & beyond. And this thing can "See" lightyears beyond anything Hubble or an observatory can see. But they can get data to improve their own capabilities.

 

[7mm08mo]

Pretty neat stuff.

 

[nuevo_eph]

Looks like an awesome tour! I've done the visitor center self tour. Still can't wrap my head around exactly how they can form an image from radio waves (if I'm remembering that correctly). Great pics!

Essentially we calculate a 2D image of the radio emissions the antennas are looking at (1 GHz to 50 GHz). Your eye does the same with wavelengths of visible light (430,000 GHz to 770,000 GHZ!!), assigning "blue" to this wavelength, "red" to that one, and so on. So then we assign colors to particular wavelengths, with stronger signals getting stronger (brighter) coloring. The real magic is actually creating that 2D representation of the measurement of power coming into the antennas. That takes a lot of math and a lot of signals being collected and combined.

 

[hank4elk]

...yeah,what he said......

 

[Brando]

Wow! I just keep thinking imagine all the antelope you could glass from on one of those...

 

[prhunter]

Very cool! I've driven by there many times.