I’ll keep with the India theme from last week and choose a few more pictures from the Giant Metre Radio Telescope (GMRT), which I visited last March as part of a whirlwind trip to Bangalore and Pune. The telescope is located on the Deccan Plateau with the central cluster of antenna on some really lovely property owned by National Centre for Astrophysics (NCRA) and then branching out with a a few antenna up to 25 km away (map of the array). At the center of the array, they have a heavily watered garden that includes a model of the distribution of the antenna:
model of the GMRT array located next to the central telescope
We drove around the property a bit (all dirt roads), but didn’t have time to go and visit the antennas further out. We did go into the central antenna, which was nicely air conditioned to make sure the electronics worked. (March in India means that air conditioning is pretty welcome even if you do have to share it with servers.)
Because I was with astrophysicists and engineers, I didn’t have the chance to go and visit the local outcrops of the flood basalt up close and personal, so most of my pictures are of flowers:
just one of the many types of flowers cultivated at GMRT
I do have a few “geology” related pictures:
mud cracks in the grounds surrounding GMRT
part of a rock sculpture in the garden at GMRT
part of the garden rock sculpture
rock sculpture (?) at GMRT
walls made up of basalt were everywhere
Inner courtyard at the research facility at GMRT. I don’t know whether the hexagon paving tiles were a nod to the local geology or not, but I thought they were a cool link to the flood basalts.
I’ve got some more “buildings constructed using cool basalt” pictures from Pune that I’ll share next week 
Elli Goeke
