RV Pickup and VLA

After a night in Albuquerque we drove to the Bonito Hollow RV Park to pickup the RV; the park did a wonderful job taking care of the RV and my tow truck, and I am very thankful for their efforts on my behalf. The drive included an I25 lunch stop in San Antonio, NM at The Buckhorn for their famous green chili cheeseburger--highly recommended.

After a short drive to Socorro, NM we got setup at the Socorro Rodeo RV Park yesterday, and to our surprise, we were the only folks there--talk about privacy!! Today we made a day trip to visit an attraction which I had observed from the air many times--the VLA, Very Large Array. It is located a desert plain and consists of twenty seven very large radio-telescopes. Weighing in at 230 tons, each dish is 82' in diameter and stands 94'. The dishes are located on movable platforms and are moved on 13 mile long rail tracks in a large "Y" design; this allows the greatest distance to be 26 miles

between units, the "D" formation. The photos show the entrance and the current collection of the dishes in their "A" formation, all within half mile of each other.

With a 1973 conception, the VLA's upgraded computer power is very impressive. One of their data processors can perform 120 Gigabytes/sec which is equivalent of 450 copies of War and Peace every 1/10 second. Another computer system processes 16 quadrillion calculations each second--if there were 6 billion earthly humans performing a calculation each second, it would take a month to do what this computer can do in a second.