A friend and I had been saying for years that we wanted to visit the NRAO and see the radio telescope. A friend of ours had done graduate work on the predecesso

A friend and I had been saying for years that we wanted to visit the NRAO and see the radio telescope. A friend of ours had done graduate work on the predecessor of the current telescope. We finally picked a weekend in the Fall of 2006 and I went online to get directions and stuff, only to discover that we had, by shear coincidence, picked the 50th anniversary open house day! The drive from the Washington, DC, area took us over several mountains, which, this being fall, were beautiful with fall foliage. The Quiet Zone really is in the middle of nowhere, and coming across this Mad Science facility there made us feel like we'd stumbled across a James Bond villain lair. It was a great day to visit, they had more of the facility open to visitors than usual. We were given, for free, disposable film cameras to take down to the antenna, since our digital cameras would have been too noisy! The antenna is amazing, they had it moving and it was nearly silent and smooth as a precision watch. The 60th anniversary will be next year, it may be time for a return visit.