Sunday, August 12, 2007

Contact: at the Very Large Array

Bloggin to you from a very nice Flagstaf, AZ Quality Inn via their very nice highspeed internet. Road trip to LA in progress and going well.

Pics from today's expedition to the Petrified Forest (which is actually a fossilized logjam, not a forest) will be forthcoming. In fact, my recently re-discovered GI Joes have been traveling with us and greatly enjoyed a chance to get back into the field.

But today you get pix from the Very Large Array. The VLA is a very large radio telescope used for gathering information about the universe. It was also featured prominently in the film, "Contact," starring Jodie Foster in which she uses the VLA to listen for space aliens. The Very Large Array is a series of very large satelite dishes that can be configured in a variety of ways for different applications, sort of like a zoom lens on a camera.

My brother Jason and I stumbled upon it and were duly wowed by it in all it's nerdy glory. This is the array that provided evidence for the existence of black holes. Very cool. I did my best Jodie Foster imitation.



Even Jason got in on the action:

1 comment:

Ben and Brandy said...

This sort of thing is going to hasten at least one of us westward. I leave it to you to guess which one.

It's late, and I'm too tired to work through how to make an "awful waste of all that face" joke.

-Ben