Photos -- The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array

From the album: One of the VLA's radio telescopes.

Drive westward from the town of Socorro, New Mexico and you will eventually see them. Rising above the flat high desert scrubland of the Plains of San Agustin the bone-white radio telescopes of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) stand like silent giants.

This array is used by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory  in conjunction with the Very Long Baseline Array, a system that stretches across North America and controlled remotely from the center at the VLA site, to peer deep into space.

Objects that are commonly studied include radio galaxies, quasars, pulsars, supernova remnants, gamma ray bursts, radio-emitting stars, the sun and planets, astrophysical masers, black holes, and the hydrogen gas that constitutes a large portion of the Milky Way galaxy as well as external galaxies. In 1989 the VLA was used to receive radio communications from the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew by Neptune.

The sensing equipment on each dish is cooled to near absolute zero to reduce molecular vibrations and background noise.

When I got stationed in El Paso, Texas during my last years in the Army I knew the VLA was one of those places I just had to visit. I was just getting started with photography then. Composition, lighting and color weren't one of the things I was concerned about yet, I just wanted to document something that I thought was fascinating.

I went through and tried to pick out the best images from my trip to the VLA. They can be found in this album on Picasa.

All images were taken with a Canon Powershot S5IS.