Oops!

We stopped at a wonderful little mineral museum with shelves of minerals and rocks from both the area and the world.  It is part of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology so there were educational sections like gold, silver, and copper ores or crystal shapes.   Plus there were some excellent intricate fossils.  I took several pictures ready to share on this blog.  When I got to the next stop I was taking a few pictures.  At one point I took a really bad picture.  In deleting this picture I accidently deleted all of my pictures of that day.  Oops!

Our next stop was the Very Large Array (VLA).  This is 27 radio telescopes in a Y-formation that can be positioned as far as a 13 miles radius.  This is essentially equal to a radio telescope that has a 13 mile radius.  It’s also part of a Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA) that has radio telescopes from New England to California.  So it’s pretty amazing to see some of the pictures of galaxies and such.  The details of the complex like moving the telescopes into place were also interesting.

If the pictures look familiar it's because several movies like Contact and Independence Day used them as back drop.  Pretty cool!  BTW, the weather was pretty interesting too.