Visit

The author, dishing. To get to the National Radio Telescope Observatory, you have to be committed. Well, first, you have to be in New Mexico -- about an hour's drive south of Albuquerque, in the plains of San Augustin, to be precise, a Pleistocene lakebed bordered by the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert and dotted with arid shrubs. Despite being some 6,970 feet above sea level, it feels like the basement of the world, wide and flat and under the massive Southwestern sky. Driving to the Observatory, the home of the famous "Very Large Array" of radio telescopes, is an exercise in…