Photo – Page 14 – National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Moonset at the VLA

Moonset — around 2:30 a.m. — at the Very Large Array on the Plains of San Agustin, about 50 miles west of Socorro, New Mexico.

North American ALMA Antenna and Stars

A close up shot of one of the 25 North American ALMA antennas at night under the incredibly clear skies of the Atacama Desert.

Pictured here is one of the cold cartridge assemblies of the Band 10 receiver, which gives ALMA its highest-frequency capabilities. The Band 10 receiver can only be used under ideal conditions when there is minimal water vapor present in the atmosphere above the already arid Atacama Desert. Use of this receiver recently allowed astronomers to detect steams of heavy water (HDO) and complex molecules in a region of the Cat’s Paw Nebula.

Flowers on the Plains of San Agustin

Flowers accompanied by the Very Large Array on the Plains of San Agustin.

The St. Croix Antenna

The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) station on St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, in a photo made prior to Hurricane Maria. Funding from the National Science Foundation will be used to repair damage caused by that storm in 2017.

VLA Panorama

The Very Large Array (VLA) is a collection of 27 radio antennas located at the NRAO site in Socorro, New Mexico. Each antenna in the array measures 25 meters (82 feet) in diameter and weighs about 230 tons.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the U.S. National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
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