At Green Bank

[beamjockey]

Posting from the National Radio Quiet Zone, thanks to the miracle of Ethernet cable.

I arrived at Green Bank on Sunday afternoon for the SETI workshop. Met extremely interesting people. This was followed by a fabulous day which included a visit to the Green Bank Telescope.



Here is Hannah House, where I am staying. The GBT is on the horizon, near the center of the photo. Its dish is over two acres in area.

(Webcast of Tuesday and Wednesday's SETI sessions will be readily decoded by any civilization in the galaxy which has developed Windows Media Player. See here for details of the sessions and attendees.)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Cool. But I thought that they banned the use of digital cameras in the quiet zone?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

They do indeed. I was able to borrow a Pentax ME SLR. I still had some film left in the fridge. We'll see how the pictures come out.

Other visitors, including Frank Drake, were carrying disposable film cameras, available in the Green Bank visitor center.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

As an irrelevant aside, I would have skipped the flash on this one. It looks like all it accomplished was to highlight the guy wire in the foreground. Besides, a camera flash probably puts out more RF noise than a digital camera, between the switching power supply that charges the capacitor and the spark discharge. Probably triply so for disposable cameras with flash, those are horrendously noisy. But maybe it's a frequency they don't care about.

[(Anonymous)]

I am just wondering why people go through all the expence when we are told that there are other people out there in the universe. It is in Gods word. Other then the angles they will not be coming here as we are corentin.

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

Probably a good thing the list of participants didn't give your full occupation. One could imagine someone in the media asking, "Just why *did* NRAO feel the need to bring in a 'radiation safety physicist' from Fermilab, hmm?"