The VLA at Night

Two weeks ago today, my husband went back to the Very Large Array for an evening of photography (see earlier post here for out tour of the VLA during the day). The class was double the usual size because one of the previous nights had been cloudy – i.e. the whole point was to get stars in the photograph and that couldn’t happen on a cloudy evening. They had a short lecture to explain the process and then headed out to position themselves around the same radio telescope that we saw during the day.

They took pictures with 30 second exposures so that the stars were still points of light rather than trails…and the dish was ‘light painted’ during that time so it would be clearly visible in the pictures.

The sky is very dark in that part of New Mexico and the Milky Way looked more like I remember it as a child. My husband was pleased with most of the pictures he got and he picked his favorite for me to include with this post.

If we go to the Festival of the Cranes at Bosque del Apache again, he’ll take the advanced version of the course!

The Very Large Array (VLA)

On our second afternoon in New Mexico we drove out to the Very Large Array (radio astronomy observatory). It is located about 50 miles west of Socorro, NM where our hotel was located. It took us a little over a hour to drive there from the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge where we had been in the morning (see yesterday’s post about the morning’s activities). It was a scenic drive through the Magdalena Mountains. We had opted to make the trek when we did because the forecast for the next day was for high winds.

As we drove into the parking lot – there was a sign telling us to turn off any cell phones or electronic devices. The first picture I took was of a tile in the bathroom --- a stylized image of a radio telescope disk.

The VLA is made of 27 25-meter radio telescopes in a Y-shaped array. They radio telescopes can be moved along a Y shaped track. They were not in the tightest configuration while we were there so it was hard to get more than one at a time in a picture. During our tour, the telescopes were running a maintenance protocol and the dishes moved.

I was surprised how some of the equipment was in boxes on landing under the dish!

A few days later, my husband went back to the VLA at night and got some excellent pictures of the stars with a radio telescope in the foreground. I’ll post about that some other time.

Home Again

We returned home yesterday after a week in New Mexico at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge’s Festival of the Cranes. So many photographs….they’ll come out in blog posts over the next few weeks. We had early mornings at the refuge to see the cranes and snow geese take off from wetlands where they roost as the sun came up…and a few programs that were in the dark at the end of the day to see owls and for my husband to make a side trip to the Very Large Array Radio Telescope for stars and radio disk photography. We stayed in Socorro, NM and flew in and out of Albuquerque.

We drove from Socorro to Albuquerque on Sunday because our flight on Monday was early. I was reminded again of how much I like the ‘highway art’ of the area with the mountains, buttes and arroyos….the blue and terracotta of the overpasses…a Kachina themed sculpture… and a rabbit pebble mosaic on an embankment.

The airport is New Mexico specific too with sculpture and Black Mesa coffee.

The theme continues with the tile in the bathrooms…and I appreciated that they seemed to be cleaner than most airport bathrooms and that the stall doors opened outward (easier when you have roll aboard luggage in tow)!

We got home by mid-afternoon to a cold and breezy Baltimore. Today is grocery day….to buy all the fixings for our Thanksgiving feast!