In April of 2010 we were traveling out west and decided to make a side trip to see the Very Large Array radio telescope. The phrase "side trip" is not to be taken lightly since the VLA is located very far from civilization because of electrical noise. Radio telescopes need protection from electrical devices like radios, cell phones and even automobile ignitions. Several years ago a radio astronomer made a an observation about radio telescopes. He said that there is more energy in a single falling snowflake than in all of the energy ever collected by all of the radio telescopes ever made. You can see why even the slightest bit of electrical interference can ruin observations.

Many people have seen the VLA from parts of the movie "Contact". The large dish arrays formed part of the backdrop although there was some Hollywood fakery too.

The VLA is about 2 hours from Albuquerque NM. The country is pretty wild and looks something like this:

A welcoming sign.

It is operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and consists of 28 movable dish antennas. They move along 3 railroad tracks and can be configured to be close together for high resolution or further apart of maximum sensitivity. Two of the tracks are 13 miles long and the other is 11 miles long. Here is some technical data about the antennas.

The dish antennas are about 85' across and when you have 28 of them all together the total effect is stunning. Here are some images that we took.

This little dish is for weather monitoring. One of the "real" antennas is in the background.
We were able to get up close to the dishes and as you can see from these photos they are serious pieces of machinery. Note the tracks.
Here's how you move them around.
After walking around outside we got to go into the control room and see some of the back end equipment.
Our guide. A really knowledgeable and enthusiastic guy.	Some of the equipment racks.
Here's the control room which looks out over the nearby dishes. Now, in the movie "Contact" this was not the control room that Jodie Foster used. Instead there was a movie set control room built on stilts that gave a "better" view of the dishes.

Here's the link to the NRAO site with information about related scientific breakthroughs and visiting.