So, what this New Mexico trip entailed was first, the drive down to Socorro from Sioux Falls, SD (where I borrowed my mother's cute, fuel-efficient Civic). Socorro is the location of NRAO, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. They were holding a week-long summer school all about the VLA (Very Large Array) and it's goodness.
On the way to Socorro, I went through Santa Fe, stopped in Los Alamos and wandered, then through Albuquerque and on down to Socorro. I participated in the Summer School, then went for a drive through New Mexico - down to Alamogordo and White Sands and such. After that, I went back to Socorro for a little bit, then back to Sioux Falls and from there, to Minneapolis. It was tons of fun and I'd love to do it again :)
Here, I present pictures of the trip, not necessarily in chronological order.

For sister Svaya - the PowerPuff Girls motorcycle!!
I saw it in the Albuquerque suburb of Bernalillo. Her license plate said POWRPUF. Oh so cute.

For brother Ian - here is your skunkbush sumac!! bigger   super huge
This was in White Sands National Monument - a totally awesome place!! They have to use snowplows to get the sand off the roads. Anyway, this bush will get overrun by dunes at various times during it's life and so in order to survive, it will grow really fast and will end up building this pedestal which is basically sandstone (water and the gypsum sand create hardness). When the dune passes, the pedestal (this one is approx. 25 feet high) is left. Very cool.

For sister Tyan - the Headhunters Salon!! bigger   super huge
While driving down the main drag of scenic Alamogordo, NM I happened upon this hair salon - I thought it was super cool, therefore, here it is :)

After I went to Los Alamos (which has a really good atom bomb museum!!), I decided to take the scenic route out. To the west and south of the Los Alamos mesa is a forest (a National Forest - it burned a couple years back) and I figured it would be really cool to drive through that. After a while, through the trees, I started to glimpse yellow grassland - I found it totally wierd. Finally I came upon it's full glory and here is a picture of it.
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This turned out to be an ancient caldera - a collapsed volcanic crater. I found (and find) this fascinating - there just aren't any trees on the lower part of it. This feature is completely visible from space too :)

The road from Los Alamos to Albuquerque is rather roundabout but it goes through some beautiful country. It is DESERT and I'm pretty sure part of it is a reservation. It is poor country as well, but I liked it. I never did get a picture of a beautiful white church - I'll have to go back for it :) But I got this neat picture...
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 bigger   super huge   On the way to White Sands,
I happened by a sign that said "Three Rivers Petroglyph Site" so I decided to check it out. It was damn hot and sunny, but it was a very interesting place. the petroglyphs were in very good shape (I thought) for being so old. I'm amazed they are still there.

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New Mexico is a geologically interesting place. On the way to White Sands, I came across "The Valley of Fire" and it was this - a great big, black lava flow. Lava flows are extremely fertile ground for plants (especially the yuccas it seems), so it will slowly but surely be erased by vegetation.

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Here is a lovely church in Socorro. I'm not sure who built it or really anything about it, but I think it's neat.

Ah, the VLA, the reason for my trip. We got the super-duper tour of the place because we were students and being lead by astronomers that work there. Therefore, we got to actually go up inside of a dish!! Just so you know, there are 27 dishes (each about 25 meters - that's about 82 feet) arranged in a Y-pattern. They are mobile - via train tracks. Sometimes they span 36 km, and sometimes they only span 1 km. It is a great instrument for studying the radio waves that come from outer space :)

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I, the super-dork, in front of the North Arm. It was very hot that day and very sunny. But it was fun :)

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This is the underside of one of the dishes. My group and I were just about to go up into the dish itself. We had to wear hard-hats. Observe the structure... This thing is massive.

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Here we are in the dish - this is looking up at the support structure for the mechanism that the radio waves use to bounce into the detectors.

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The detectors that I mentioned before. Each tube is for a specific wavelegth of radio wave. Notice that everything is very white and that the colors are very dark/bold. This is because of the fact that there is a special type of paint on the dishes - it reflects both optical and infrared light. This made it enormously bright and also hot. Cripes. But I got to walk on a VLA dish!