When our friends heard we had stopped in Roswell, they asked, "Did you see an alien?"
Drag your mouse across the curtain, and you'll see what we saw!

He looked as pale as plastic, and a lot more life-like - or dead-like than the doctor who was attending him.

Next we moved on to Socorro, and the Very Large Array. Very Serious Stuff. No alien contact is attempted here, either, the movie "Contact" and Jodi Foster notwithstanding.

The array consists of 27 Very Large (81') Dish Antennas, strung out along 3 legs of rr track in a Y formation. When they are close, they are Very Very Close, and the photo ops are spectacular. The day we were there, they were Very Very Far, strung out at the farthest distance apart, and it was impossible to photograph the array as I had hoped.

This set of dish antennas captures signals from the stars in the radio frequencies, which penetrate interstellar dust clouds and the like and so can reach into corners of the universe that optical telescopes cannot. With an array, they use the interference patterns between each pair of antennas which gives them better definition and information.

At the visitor center, we also saw a map and explanation of the Fantastically Tremendous Extremely Large Baseline Array. This one consists of 10 large dish antennas strung out across the US continent, with one in Hawaii and one in the Virgin Islands defining the group.

The technique is the same but with the distances between the antennas being larger, the interference is greater, the information is finer.

I have also heard of a Very Small Array, in the back yard of a radio ham, H. Paul Shuch, in eastern PA. It uses 8 donated dish antennas and a lot of ham ingenuity. Mr. Shuch is also an officer with SETI.

And so we come full circle back to the aliens. SETI@home is a program that "borrows" - uses hundreds of thousands of home computers to analyze the data from their radio telescopes. The people participating in this program are given a screen saver and a block of data. When they are not actually using them, their computers will be analyzing the data, sending the results back to SETI. Many Pittsburghers are doing SETI@home, I know one or two myself.