Greeting from Space Command!
 

Arrived back in Green Bank this evening to a picnic! Got to chow down and visit with some old friends. Took an evening hike around the GBT...golly that thing is big close up...looks like the mother ship in "Close Encounters". I will be driving my Russian friends around southern West Virginia tomorrow, I sure hope the weather is nice. I am driving the Impreza on this trip, a little more comfortable for an older person riding in the back. Will check in with everyone later. Don:)

Re: Greeting from Space Command!
 

I had no idea what Don was talking about, so I looked around. I'm assuming this is what he's talking about:

http://www.gb.nrao.edu/GBT/GBT.html

Very cool stuff. I'll use this opportunity to plug SETI@Home. Go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu and d/l the client software to use your home PC's (or work computer if you have permission - about a thousand of us got in trouble at Lockheed Martin) spare time to crunch radio telescope data.

Really, the installation is a piece of cake and, after processing over 2,800 work units for S@H, I can just about guarantee that you won't even notice it's running. Those 2,800 work units, by the way, translate to over 4 years of computer time I've donated over the 2 years I've been running the software.

Anyway, the GBT is cool stuff - I had heard of using actuators on large reflecting telescopes, but not on radio telescopes. Neat.

Re: Re: Greeting from Space Command!
 

CUbe, yes, that's what Don's talking about. He took us there when we met at Snowshoe (on my way home from VT). If you look in my locker, the telescope is visible in one of the pics I took along the roadside. It's just after the last barn on the right. :D

Bushed
 

Hello again....Didn't get home last night until after midnight. I had driven my Russian friends over 400 miles...Droop Mountain Battlefield...Lost World Caverns...New River Gorge Bridge (where Ilya was given a ride on a Harley-Davidson by a biker!)...down into the Gorge...Summersville Lake, and hydroelectric dam and Gauley River. We covered US history, the formation of West Virginia, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Cold War, Russian History, the fall of Communism, Mir, life in Ilya and Nadia's hometown..etc. etc...by the time my head hit the pillow, I was gone.
Off goes the alarm at 6:30 and I'm off to the first day of a week of special education reading instruction. Toothpicks held up my eyelids...

I apologize for not being clearer about Green Bank. A visit to the GBT was one of the highlights of the Snowshoe meet last fall. If you click on this address: http://www.nrao.edu/education/ you will see the 40ft scope that my group used for two weeks last summer. Ilya came back for his final course this summer, and brought his mother with him to take the two week course that he and I had finished last year. She has a PhD in math and biology and teaches at Astrakan University. Ilya is working on his PhD in physics; his dad also teaches in the university. Well, at least they have seen a fair slice of rural America, and I think Nadia was fairly well impressed, coming from the old Communist system. She is 60 years old, graduated high school about the time of Sputnik. Jean met us at the Gorge Bridge and we had a picnic for them. They both got to see the SVX and Ilya got behind the wheel...."Cockpit! Like airplane! Cool windows! (three girls at a drive thru thought so too!) He thought I was rich to have such a car. No I said, bought it used. You only have to be rich to fix it....:rolleyes: Don

The humour may have been out there...
 

but it's back.

Don, just back from my motorbike holiday with my friend from the MCA, the Marine Coastal Authority in Britain. We sussed that the Fresnel lenses in lighthouses rotate clockwise.

Now the bad news. When you were at GBT, any info on parabolic dishes there? I say this, because your avatar has the transmission[or reception] axis off centre. Hard to get good electronics since the fall of the USSR, eh?

Joe:)

Slightly off-center
 

<I say this, because your avatar has the transmission[or reception] axis off centre>

I have been accused of being slightly off-center before...:rolleyes:

The clip art folks didn't know this I'm sure, but luckily this is ONE area where reality gets to step in and say OK. Several of the newer dishes have offset feeds, the greatest being the mighty GBT itself. Check on one of the aforementioned websites and check out the pictures. A offset keeps the receiver structure from getting in the way of the incoming signals. With the GBT, the design is such that the feedhorn is located at a theoretical center of a much larger dish. The actual GBT surface area is like just one petal of a larger flower. The GBT only receives, but the big dish in Puerto Rico has a moveable feed and can transmit also. Together, they recently mapped the surface of Venus with more accuracy than an earlier spacecraft that actually ORBITED our sister planet! :eek: Don

http://www.gb.nrao.edu/GBT/technicalterms.html

PS Glad your motorbike holiday went well and safely!