If you're ever in New Mexico and you drive southwest of Albuquerque, you'll eventually hit the high plains.

The towns here are few and far between, but as you keep driving through this barren stretch of desert, something strange appears in the distance.

This huge white satellite dish slowly rises on the horizon. And then another and another

until they seem almost endless. It's like looking at some kind of techno futuristic stone hedge,

like they were dropped from the sky.

These great big parabolic dishes,

which are slowly scanning the sky,

are all part of one giant telescope called the Very Large Array.

The VLA covers a distance of 22 miles in the desert, nearly double the length of Manhattan.

And it is one giant telescope that can detect

all of the kinds of things that we can't see with our own eyes,

things with very faint signals from black holes,

the remnants of supernova,

all of the stuff between the stars.

I like to think of myself as a space cadet,

and I've pretty much been obsessed with space

since I was a little kid, and then also being bit by the astrophysics bug.

I'm Doolant Thuris, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today we're talking to someone whose sole job is to share the awesomeness of the very large array.

Summer Ash is the steam education manager at the VLA

and a bit of a telescope tourist.

So we're going to talk with Summer

...