Dish of the Day
Yesterday, as planned, we drove my family to the Green Bank National Radio Astronomy Observatory. You can check out their site for all the gory details as to what sort of stuff the NRAO does, but the short version is that the observatory is home to several small, medium, large and big honkin' mo-fo grande radio telescope dishes that allow scientists to scan the heavens and detect and record the natural radio-waves emitted by all matter out there. These waves can give a far clearer picture of what's up there than conventional visual telescopes are capable. The observatory itself is situated within the town of Green Bank, WV, a tiny community situated in a bowl-like valley in a county containing a population of around 9000 people. It also has government-mandated levels of radio silence to keep man-made signals from causing interference with the telescopes.
We got a late start in leaving for the trip, but this was something I'd factored into my planning. I told my family that I was aiming to leave at 11 a.m. in order to make the 1 p.m. tour time knowing full well we would be incapable of departure before 11:30. I was right. Still, we would have been slightly early for the tour had there not been a few come to a complete halt and wait 5 minutes for heavy machinery to get out of the way road repair delays in the journey. We wound up nearly 15 minutes late as a result, but the Green Bank folks let us join the tour late and let us watch the film we'd missed after the tour itself.
The tour was mostly by bus, which took us out to see all the various radio telescopes on-site. The largest of these dishes, the aforementioned big honkin' mo-fo grande one, is 100 meters in diameter. It's an impressive amount of dish, though there are plenty of others that would qualify as impressively huge if not for their bigger brother's shadow dwarfing them. Here's a picture of my "fambly" (sister, wife, step-mom, dad) standing in front of it so you can see something of the scale.
(West Virginians often used to joke that the state flower was the satellite dish due to the rural nature of the state and lack of proper television reception because of all the mountains. There's an ironic joke to be made in correlation to Green Bank, but damn if I've come up with it yet.)
My dad is a huge science nerd, not to mention an amateur radical theoretical astro-physicist, so he was just pig in slop happy to see this place. I'm not so much of a science nerd, but I thought it was plenty cool all the same. We were also very very fortunate in that we were able to see the big dish move while we were there. Normally, it doesn't spend a whole lot of time moving around unless it's operators are switching between projects, so most visitors don't get to see it in motion. However, we came on a day in which they were doing maintenance on the dish, and while we were standing out near it a klaxon sounded and the whole thing began a turnin'. For such an enormous construct, it moves with surprising speed and grace.
The real discovery of the day, though, was the exhibit hall back at the Green Bank
Observatory tourist center. They had lots of different displays about radio telescopic astronomy, some of the discoveries made using it and other sundry stuff. What really caught our attention, though, was an infa-red camera display that you could stand in front of and see your heat-pattern on a large monitor. That was the coolest thing there. I'd never seen my heat pattern before and have only seen similar effects in the Predator movies, so I was locked in front of that thing. Even better was when I discovered I could put my camera on night mode and take flashless pictures of the images. Soon I had the whole family gathered around the camera to experiment, leave heat patterns on one another and have fun. We stopped just short of mooning the camera.
The parents loved it. The sister loved it. The wife and I loved it. All in all it was one of the more successful family road-trips we've ever had.
We got a late start in leaving for the trip, but this was something I'd factored into my planning. I told my family that I was aiming to leave at 11 a.m. in order to make the 1 p.m. tour time knowing full well we would be incapable of departure before 11:30. I was right. Still, we would have been slightly early for the tour had there not been a few come to a complete halt and wait 5 minutes for heavy machinery to get out of the way road repair delays in the journey. We wound up nearly 15 minutes late as a result, but the Green Bank folks let us join the tour late and let us watch the film we'd missed after the tour itself.
The tour was mostly by bus, which took us out to see all the various radio telescopes on-site. The largest of these dishes, the aforementioned big honkin' mo-fo grande one, is 100 meters in diameter. It's an impressive amount of dish, though there are plenty of others that would qualify as impressively huge if not for their bigger brother's shadow dwarfing them. Here's a picture of my "fambly" (sister, wife, step-mom, dad) standing in front of it so you can see something of the scale.
(West Virginians often used to joke that the state flower was the satellite dish due to the rural nature of the state and lack of proper television reception because of all the mountains. There's an ironic joke to be made in correlation to Green Bank, but damn if I've come up with it yet.)
My dad is a huge science nerd, not to mention an amateur radical theoretical astro-physicist, so he was just pig in slop happy to see this place. I'm not so much of a science nerd, but I thought it was plenty cool all the same. We were also very very fortunate in that we were able to see the big dish move while we were there. Normally, it doesn't spend a whole lot of time moving around unless it's operators are switching between projects, so most visitors don't get to see it in motion. However, we came on a day in which they were doing maintenance on the dish, and while we were standing out near it a klaxon sounded and the whole thing began a turnin'. For such an enormous construct, it moves with surprising speed and grace.
The real discovery of the day, though, was the exhibit hall back at the Green Bank
Observatory tourist center. They had lots of different displays about radio telescopic astronomy, some of the discoveries made using it and other sundry stuff. What really caught our attention, though, was an infa-red camera display that you could stand in front of and see your heat-pattern on a large monitor. That was the coolest thing there. I'd never seen my heat pattern before and have only seen similar effects in the Predator movies, so I was locked in front of that thing. Even better was when I discovered I could put my camera on night mode and take flashless pictures of the images. Soon I had the whole family gathered around the camera to experiment, leave heat patterns on one another and have fun. We stopped just short of mooning the camera.The parents loved it. The sister loved it. The wife and I loved it. All in all it was one of the more successful family road-trips we've ever had.
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