Hey everyone, Mono Gonzalez here from the Salm 19 Project.

We are in New Mexico at the very large array, as you can see behind us.

And I am here with Montana.

Very nice to have you.

Thank you for having me.

And for our audience, kind of share a little bit about what you do here. Absolutely. So my name is Montana Williams. So I'm the senior education officer here at the VLA. So that means I oversee all of the education and public outreach that we do. So that includes the tours when you visit on the weekends. It also includes reserve tours for like schools and stuff like that. Then we also go out into New Mexico and go to the schools and try to help with the science education in the state.

Yeah, so how long has the, well, VLA is the very large array.

Maybe tell us what that means and kind of give us some of the, some of the technical background to what we see here on this big scope.

And then how many there are and the miles and everything else. It's really fascinating.

Yeah, so this is the very large array.

This happens to be antenna number 11 right behind us. And so there are a total of 28 antennas,

27 of which are on a sort of Y configuration. And the Y shape is in the railroad tracks because we

actually move them and we have four different configurations. And they're called A, B, C, and D.

Then it goes from 22 miles in diameter to down to 0.6 miles in diameter.

We're currently in B, which is about 11 miles in diameter.

Yeah, so if you come and you see the telescopes, or I mean the railroad tracks,

at first I was like, what is this for?

But now I kind of understand how it is.

So a radio telescope is unusual.

We do a lot of astrophotography and stuff.

So we're used to visible, you know, visual telescopes.

Maybe explain for the audience what is a radio telescope.

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