Visit to the "Very Large Array"

To cap off our trip (see the next three blog posts as well), which Brian planned if you couldn't tell from all the sciencey type things, we visited the Very Large Array at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. It's open for tours on the same days as the Trinity Site. This is the world's largest array (array means "line or group of") radio telescopes that are used for astronomy. They told us that these have the power to see your cell phone's radio signals if it was on the planet Jupiter! Radio waves are just light waves we can't see with our eyes. They are lower frequency (longer wavelength). They have 27 dishes in a Y shape layout (9 along each leg, where the legs are 120 degrees apart). They told us about how they work and cool facts about them. They move these dishes once every 4 months on train tracks that are nearby using these red vehicles (pictured below) to allow them different imaging capabilities. Travis is also in the photo.

Brian was obviously very interested in seeing these and was glad we came. They were HUGE! Below is just one of them. Marcus and Lucas were more interested to dig in the dirt.

Here's a cool photo of a line of them.

And one more photo to give you an idea of how big they are and how cool it is to see.