After a great day at the spaceport, we headed north to Elephant Butte to take in the Balloon Festival, but not to be - the weather was not great, and the local motels even worse - so we decided to continue on to Socorro, where we stayed in
Room 101 - but we seem to have survived to tell the tale!
After a day's recovery from the horrors of Room 101, the next morning we popped to El Camino Diner for breakfast - a real 60's diner, checkout the classy light fittings! That evening we also experienced an authentic New Mexican cinema - we saw the geographically relevant
"Cowboys and Aliens" (filmed in New Mexico!). The cinema was very old, had big old chairs, boxes of candy and popcorn and the audience laughed loudly but only had 25 or so people in it....
On the walk back, we came across this company. Lee, is there something you should be telling us?? A little further along, a company sold large sculptures of giant green aliens, as well as a life-size Jesus...
About 50 miles west of Socorro is the
VLA (Very Large Array) - a series of 27 (yes, twenty-seven!) 230-ton radio astronomy dishes, arranged in a flexibly Y configuration. Using
astronomical interferometry, the array is the equivalent of a single dish up to 22 miles in diameter. For those film fans, Carl Sagan's
Contact was filmed there (the other dishes were added using CGI).
Ian points to the little green men. The VLA is not actually used by
SETI, but if they found an interesting anomaly, the VLA would almost certainly be asked to take a look at it. This dish actually moved into position while we were taking the photo! If you haven't got the free distributed computing SETI screensaver, get it
here to help find ET!
Back in Springerville, after a lovely meal in a 4-day-old chicken restaurant (The Roost) opposite a trailer park, we saw some tiny tots on the school field, practicing American football (grid-iron). How cute!
No comments:
Post a Comment