NM-Chapter 2 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Scope

Telescopes, telescopes, telescopes! Get ready!

To continue the New Mexico adventure, July 5th we took off early to Socorro, NM to see the Very Large Array, or VLA. The VLA is an array of 27 (technically 28, but one is always being worked on) 25m radio dishes in a Y configuration. The scopes can be moved on tracks to be closer or farther apart, depending on whether or not you want high resolution images or images that span a large field of view. At their maximum separation, the baseline is 36km! An array of multiple telescopes acts like one big telescope with a diameter the size of the baseline- so essentially when you spread the telescopes out over a 36km distance, you are making a 36km wide telescope dish! The technique of using multiple telescopes to gain better resolution is called interferometry, and it's crazy complicated and only in my wildest dreams do I someday hope to understand the Fourier transforms that make it possible...

Anyway, we drove out to the VLA and got an all-access (well, not really, but more than than the average tourist!) tour.

First glimpse of the VLA! Look at all those dishes!

SO EXCITED FOR RADIO ASTRONOMY.

I forget what this array was called, but they were long wavelength scopes.
Yes, those are telescopes!

The crawler that moved the scopes was amazing in itself. To make a turn it lowers jacks onto the ground, picks itself (AND the 230 ton telescope!) and turns 90 degrees, then lowers back down to the tracks! It moves at little over walking speed...

The machine that moves the huge 230 ton radio dishes!
A work of engineering beauty.

We got to walk on top of the radio dish! Shhhh, don't tell... :)

The dizzying view from the edge of the dish! It was pretty scary.

And, of course, I had to take the obligatory Contact photo. Every astronomer has to have seen this movie, no?!

Me as Jodie Foster and Nick as my Matthew McConaughey.

The next day it was off to Sunspot, NM to see the National Solar Observatory (NSO). Our first stop was Big Dome, a solar telescope built in the 50's! They still use it! In astronomy, that's old :P

Big Dome solar telescope. The outside mirrors that capture sunlight!

Next up was the Dunn Solar Telescope, or DST. This thing was pretty impressive. It is one of the leading solar telescopes in the world. It rises 40-some meters in the air, and goes 60m underground! We got to walk around inside and underground, but it was dark and I didn't get any good photos.

DST!

The road that leads to the NSO is called 6563, because astronomers have the best sense of humor. 6563Angstroms (or 10^-10 m!) is the wavelength of Hα, the transition when an electron falls from an excited (n=3 if you really care) state to a lower state (n=2) in an hydrogen atom. Hα traces ionized gas in clouds, so it can tell us where stars are being formed! Basically, it's just a very important line in astronomy :P

 6563, and us trying (and failing) to make the angstrom symbol...

After we went around the NSO, we took the quick trip to Apache Point Observatory (APO), across the way from NSO. APO is where the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope is.

SDSS scope.

The SDSS is a huge revolutionary project that began in 2000. It is a redshift survey (redshift=distance to an object) that's covered something like 30-some% of the sky! They have photometry (images) for 500 million objects and spectra for 1 million!!! (I've used SDSS data in multiple research projects before!) Basically, it is a totally awesome survey and has given the astronomy community lots of data and insight into the large-scale structure of the Universe.

The hundreds of spectrograph plates that  were HANDMADE and labeled for the SDSS!

The view from the SDSS catwalk. That's White Sands Nat'l Monument in the background!

Finally, after many telescope tours and way too much science to remember, we headed back to Sunspot to hang out with the NSO REU students for the night. Then back to Cloudcroft to sleep, and finally the drive back to Tucson the next morning! We arrived back just in time for the first big monsoon of the year.

The monsoon's aftermath, and a nice sunset. :)

Sorry for all the gritty astronomy details, but don't you feel a little smarter now? :) To reward you for sitting through it, here's a pretty astronomy picture: a Hubble Deep Field image. THESE GALAXIES ARE 12 BILLION YEARS OLD!!!! (The Universe is 13.7 billion years old) :):):)

I love astronomy!