Other Worlds 6-7-10

Green Bank, West Virginia

I had an other-worldly day. After going to bed in West Huntington at 1 AM I still managed to be up and out by 9 AM, heading for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, some 330 miles to the east in the remote mountains. The Radio Observatory is intentionally very remote and entailed 75 miles of winding mountain road to get on site, and the other way out was even more rugged, but so worth it. West Virginia has this pristine uncluttered uncrowded sensibility throughout much of the state. For most of my distance driving today I was nearly alone on the roads – a pleasant usually forgotten sensibility. A rather bright spot en route was the gilded dome of the State Capitol at Charleston, as handsome imposing structure along the river.

As a marginalized nerd throughout childhood with his head in the cosmos, seeing the vast telescopes at Green Bank was something I always wanted to do, not unlike scampering around Carlsbad Caverns. I remember driving 3,600 miles round trip to New Mexico once to visit Carlsbad only to find the caves closed because of a blizzard. It was another seven years before I finally got there. After fifty years of wishing, I finally made it to Green Bank at 1:30 PM today.

Astounding to me was being given permission to roam at will, unaccompanied, throughout this vast facility with its eight giant telescopes. The largest of these is 485 feet high and the dish is 110,000 square feet. It was built as a replacement for the 300-foot telescope that collapsed in 1988. It is the largest moveable man-made object on land. I walked about four and a half miles around the place, never seeing anyone except an occasional worker in the distance. I was again a seven-year old starry-eyed kid who got to see the universe beyond the alcoholic childhood I was dealt. I seem to keep ending up in these epic places all by myself, having opportunity to just soak in the experience, quite undistracted by others.

I was given permission to walk around if I promised to not use anything electrical whatever. I saw a graph of the electromagnetic interference given off by a single discharge of a digital camera. The use of a digital camera within two miles of one of these giant radio telescopes can completely overwhelm the data being collected from distant galaxies. The signals picked up by these vast telescopes are so weak, as to be obliterated by even a dog’s heating pad. A 1-watt cell phone on the moon would give off a signal so powerful as to be ‘brighter’ than anything else in the sky, excepting for the sun. Fortunately one of my cameras has an ultra long lens and I was able to easily get images of the telescopes at 2 miles, outside the so-called ‘quiet zone.’ 13,000 square miles are designated as a quiet zone without cell phones, Wi-Fi, or other noise of them modern era. Actually, it did seem rather peaceful out there.

After four hours roaming around this cosmic wonderland, I crossed over the Appalachian Mountains between Green Bank and Charlottesville, where I have landed for the night. The journey over was wondrous, silent, and emerald. Appalachia is such an amazing space to be in. It is curious how things sort out. I wrote a piece just this morning about a recent journey on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I got off at a random exit of the interstate west of Charlottesville to film the sunset and found myself at Mile Post 0 of the Blue Ridge Parkway where it begins at Rockfish Gap. I have been on it many times but never at its Virginia origin. Sunset today was most splendid up there.

Tomorrow I expect to ‘collect’ Monticello.