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We had a good time visiting with Brent and Gaylene at their place outside of Snowflake, AZ. Brent had the day off on the day we got there, so got a chance to visit with him after setting up the trailer. Sam and kids were a delight as well. We got the privilege of going through a windstorm while there and were thankful that we had Gaylene and Brent's house to shield us.
Arrived early afternoon and Brent was home, so setup trailer. Cindy stayed at the trailer while Brent and I went out to look at his section of ground, plus the survey on the split at their house property. Drank some beer while he drove me around, showing the property and surrounding area. Checked out the chickens he hatched out. Ate dinner, visited, and then off to bed for the night.
Woodruff Dam is a dam located just 13.2 miles from Holbrook, in Navajo County, in the state of Arizona, United States, near Woodruff, AZ. Woodruff is an unincorporated community in Navajo County, Arizona, United States. Woodruff is 10.5 miles (16.9 km) southeast of Holbrook. Woodruff was settled in 1876 by a group of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints led by Nathan Tenney and including Tenney's son Ammon M. Tenney. It was initially called Tenney's Settlement. In 1878 Lorenzo H. Hatch became the head of the LDS branch there. At that point it was named Woodruff after Wilford Woodruff.
Brent had to work and Gaylene had a few things to work on, so Cindy watched over Teddy. Visited and Gaylene made lasagna for supper.
Gaylene and Brent both had to work today, so Cindy and I spent the day relaxing. I read the new FMCA magazine and listened to some podcasts. Got to bed late after wandering around with Brent feeding the horses and goats plus chickens.
Brent off work today so got to hang out with him visiting. Wind was out of control at 40mph with 65mph gusts. Brent and I ran into Tractor Supply this afternoon and got dog food, and Brent got a bunch of horse feed. They made prime rib for dinner and after visiting a bit after eating we got to bed, so we can get up and break camp and get onto the road.
Drove from Gaylene and Brent's place, leaving there around 8am. Fueled and dumped at Maverick in Showlow. Datil campground: There are 18 sites here, plus one for the host. 3 pit toilets are around the loop. They are just wrapping up 3 RV only sites that will have 15a, 30a and 50a hookups but no dump station. The water was off during our one night stay. Verizon was iffy at best, with one bar of service that would occasionally let us send out a text message. BLM campsite in good repair. Might be a neat place to host as it is about the same elevation as Flagstaff. Did a walk about and paid for spot, ate some lunch and then sat in the sun and relaxed.
Morning cold (29) at Datil campground, but began warming up quickly with lots of sunshine. Cindy made eggs for breakfast, then it was time to break camp and move on to our next stop. On our way to Socorro, NM, stopped at the VAL project and took pics. Those dishes are massive.
From the early 1960s at NRAO, astronomers knew they needed an array of radio dishes to complement the work of our giant, single-dish telescopes. An array is a group of several radio antennas observing together, creating — in effect — a single telescope many miles across.
As a first step, NRAO built the Green Bank Interferometer to learn and develop the best communications, correlation, and atmospheric correction practices. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, this four-element array helped NRAO prepare for a Very Large Array of 27 telescopes.
The first consideration before building any radio telescope is its location. Cosmic radio waves are billions of a billion times fainter than radio waves used to broadcast information on Earth. Radio telescopes must be placed where they can collect these faint cosmic radio waves without any radio interference from humans or nature.
The Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico, northwest of Socorro, is a flat stretch of desert far from major cities. The Plains are ringed by mountains, which act like a natural fortress of rock that keeps out much of the radio interference from cities, even hundreds of miles away.
The desert climate of the San Agustin Plain is critical to the success of the VLA. Humidity is a real problem in radio astronomy, because water molecules distort the radio waves passing through them and also give off their own radio waves that interfere with observations at certain frequencies. Radio telescopes that collect radio waves in the same frequencies as water’s radio waves need to be in deserts to reduce this background signal from Earth-based water molecules.
Each of the VLA’s 28 antennas (including the one that is a spare) is an 82-foot dish with 8 receivers tucked inside. The dish moves on an altitude-azimuth mount, what you’ve probably seen as a classic tripod mount: it tilts up and down and spins around.
The iconic “Y” shape of the VLA is not for looks, it’s for function. The wider an array is, the bigger its eye is, and the more detail it can see out in space. The VLA’s unique shape gives us three nice long arms of nine telescopes each. It also gives us the flexibility of stretching the arms when we need to zoom in for more detail.
We put our telescopes on rails. Three times a year, a specially-designed rail truck, called a Transporter, picks up telescopes and hauls them one at a time farther down their track. Over the course of 16 months, the VLA lengthens each of its legs from two-thirds of a mile to 23 miles long.
The Very Large Array is the most versatile, widely-used radio telescope in the world. It can map large-scale structure of gas and molecular clouds and pinpoint ejections of plasma from supermassive black holes. It is the world’s first color camera for radio astronomy, thanks to its new suite of receivers and a supercomputer that can process wide fields of spectral data simultaneously. The VLA is also a high-precision spacecraft tracker that NASA and ESA have used to keep tabs on robotic spacecrafts exploring the Solar System.
Even before its formal dedication in 1980, the VLA had become an invaluable research tool. More than 5,000 astronomers from around the world have used the VLA for more than 14,000 different observing projects. The VLA has had a major impact on nearly every branch of astronomy, and the results of its research are abundant in the pages of scientific journals and textbooks. More than 500 Ph.D. degrees have been awarded on the basis of research done with the VLA.
Ice on Mercury
Mercury, the innermost planet of our Solar System, is less than half the size of the Earth but is twice as close to the Sun as we are. Parts of Mercury’s Moon-like, rocky surface are heated by the Sun to temperatures nearing 800 degrees Fahrenheit (425 degrees Celsius). This is not a world like ours, certainly.
However, in 1991, planetary scientists studied Mercury using a radar system consisting of NASA’s 70-meter (230-foot) dish antenna at Goldstone, California, equipped with a half-million-watt transmitter, and the VLA as the receiving system. The VLA was configured to map Mercury with detail down to 100 meters across.
The beam of 8.5-GHz microwaves sent from Goldstone bounced off Mercury and was collected at the VLA to produce a radar image of the planet. The researchers used the Goldstone-VLA radar system to look at the side of Mercury that was not photographed by Mariner 10 in the mid-1970s.
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