Quote:
Originally Posted by GH85Carrera
The VLA is in the USA, and has more resolution. Aercibo was state of the art 50 years ago, but science has moved on, and no one scientist wants to live in Puerto Rico now.
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Seriously though - do you think the users lived there?
Thirty years ago most of the users of Palomar and the Kitt Peak scopes were warm and happy in Cambridge, Ann Arbor, Pasadena and probably the rest of the world. You don't have to be there anymore. Heck, the astrograph Tombaugh used to discover Pluto 90 years ago could have been, had they had digital technology, run by a tech and ol' Clyde sitting somewhere warmer than a mountain in Flagstaff to do the analysis.
And w.r.t. radio scopes, the VLA is just a part of the VLBA - resulting in a radio telescope/interferometer equivalent in diameter to the earth. We have one of those dishes in Los Alamos down towards Bandolier Nat'l Monument and the Rio Grande. Because it's "behind the fence" we tell visitors it's for communication with the aliens...
The VLBA was used to make the "picture" of the black hole a few months ago.