- #1
aychamo
- 375
- 0
Hey guys ... :)
I just wanted to brag a bit. I just got back from a vacation. We hit Puerto Rico, and a couple of the carribean islands (St Maarten and Saba.)
In Puerto Rico, we went to the Arecibo Observatory. It is the huge satelite receiver that you saw in the movie Contact and one of the new James Bond movies. It was badass! It's 300m wide. That is over three football fields. To get there, we had a *long* drive through some winding roads that go UP and DOWN and get you a bit sick. Then you have to walk uphill for a good distance, it phased my parents quite a bit, the old folks :)
They had a nice big display at the observatory, it did a nice job of explaining the origin of the cosmos, in nice laymen terms. It was weird for my mother to read the stuff because she is still hanging on to a few threads of her christian upbringing of believing in creation, etc. The displays also talked about quasars, pulsars, black holes, and .. Seti @ Home!
A nice thing that they had was pictures of the displays that they had that they sent out into space on some old probes or something. The pictures tried to be blunt in showing that we have two sexes of humans, etc, really neat.
The satelite itself, was badass. It is so HUGE. You see it from up above, so you can see the entire thing, and you see the big thing on top of it hanging up there. The thing is so immense, that when you look at it you can't understand it's size, because it goes out so far and your eyes have a hard time understanding that it's like a 1000 feet across. You see all the panels that it is made of, and they look so small... until you look at one of the full size panels they have for reference.
It's really neat. I figured you guys would like to hear about it a bit, since maybe you run the seti @ home client.
I just wanted to brag a bit. I just got back from a vacation. We hit Puerto Rico, and a couple of the carribean islands (St Maarten and Saba.)
In Puerto Rico, we went to the Arecibo Observatory. It is the huge satelite receiver that you saw in the movie Contact and one of the new James Bond movies. It was badass! It's 300m wide. That is over three football fields. To get there, we had a *long* drive through some winding roads that go UP and DOWN and get you a bit sick. Then you have to walk uphill for a good distance, it phased my parents quite a bit, the old folks :)
They had a nice big display at the observatory, it did a nice job of explaining the origin of the cosmos, in nice laymen terms. It was weird for my mother to read the stuff because she is still hanging on to a few threads of her christian upbringing of believing in creation, etc. The displays also talked about quasars, pulsars, black holes, and .. Seti @ Home!
A nice thing that they had was pictures of the displays that they had that they sent out into space on some old probes or something. The pictures tried to be blunt in showing that we have two sexes of humans, etc, really neat.
The satelite itself, was badass. It is so HUGE. You see it from up above, so you can see the entire thing, and you see the big thing on top of it hanging up there. The thing is so immense, that when you look at it you can't understand it's size, because it goes out so far and your eyes have a hard time understanding that it's like a 1000 feet across. You see all the panels that it is made of, and they look so small... until you look at one of the full size panels they have for reference.
It's really neat. I figured you guys would like to hear about it a bit, since maybe you run the seti @ home client.