The 2013 SARA Western Regional Conference will be held at Best Western Socorro Hotel & Suites in New Mexico on Saturday and Sunday, February 9 and 10, 2013. We will have a tour of the Very Large Array (VLA) site west of Socorro. In addition to presentations by SARA members, we plan to have speakers from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Array Operations Center (NRAO AOC) in Socorro. Additional details will be published online and in the SARA journal as we get closer to the conference date. Register now to avoid the rush and to guarantee a seat at the conference.

VLA site tour: The Very Large Array consists of 27 parabolic dish reflector antennas in a Y-shaped configuration on the Plains of San Agustin approximately fifty miles west of Socorro: http://www.vla.nrao.edu/. Each antenna is 25 m in diameter. The data from the antennas is combined electronically to give a resolution equivalent to an antenna 36 km across, with the sensitivity of a dish 130 m in diameter. The array has been undergoing an expansion project called the EVLA, or Expanded VLA. The facility also is the home of the Long Wavelength Array (LWA): http://www.phys.unm.edu/~lwa/index.html. The LWA uses many inexpensive antennas to provide a very large aperture. The LWA is designed to probe the depths of space at relatively low frequencies between 10 and 88 MHz. There are 256 antennas in an antenna station and each is a drooping dual-dipole about 1.5 m high and 2.7 m across.

Contact: Please contact conference coordinator Whit Reeve if you have any questions about the conference or if you would like to help: westernconference[at]radio-astronomy.org.

Registration info and other details are here:
http://www.radio-astronomy.org/?q=node/396

The tentative schedule and some abstracts are here:

• Schedule: http://www.radio-astronomy.org/?q=node/401
• Abstracts: http://www.radio-astronomy.org/?q=node/402

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