Today my travels took me to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array along US 60 in western New Mexico.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array

The collection of 27 dishes pick up signals on the electromagnetic spectrum from distant objects in the universe like black holes and supernovae and every other awesomely cool phenomena waiting for its own episode of Star Trek.  (C’mon, CBS; get on that!)

They can move the antennae around with these sets of double railroad tracks, one of which crosses the highway.

We’ve been driving past this facility periodically for over a month and finally had the time to visit the actual visitor’s center today.

There’s some cool stuff there especially if you’re into science and astronomy.  You look around at all these gargantuan machines probing into the far corners of known space and it makes you feel better about our species.  Here we have a sizable investment of resources devoted to the advancement of human knowledge.  The 27 dishes combining their efforts to effectively create a single antenna miles and miles across is an uplifting metaphor for what people can accomplish when we try.

I definitely picked up some swag at the gift shop.  I wish I had more time to hang out at the VLA, but this time of year, we’ve gotta take advantage of high sun to do our job.  We’ve got our own science data to collect.