Blizzard of 2005
The first two days of our trip to Puerto Rico were spent in Cambridge, watching 30 inches of snow fall, then waiting for the streets and airport runways to be cleared.
San Juan
Eventually, we arrived in San Juan.
Arecibo Observatory
Arecibo is home to the world's largest and most-sensitive single-dish radio telescope.
Control Room
Sixto Gonzalez, Director of the Observatory, took us behind the scenes to the control rooms. The telescope is used to study the properties of planets, comets and asteroids. It detects the faint pulses emitted hundreds of times per second from pulsars in our galaxy.
Catwalk
Suspended 450 feet above the reflector is the platform that houses the receivers and most of the front-end electronics for processing signals. Getting there was half the fun.
Big Dish
The huge "dish" is 1000 feet in diameter and covers an area of about twenty acres.
El Yunque
Our guide for a hike in El Yunque rain forest was Dr. Ariel Lugo, Director of the International Institute of Tropical Forestry.
Canopy Tower
We visited several research sites and climbed up a metal tower to get a better view of the canopy.
Rainforest Picnic
Boyce and the fellows eat lunch streamside.
Cloud Forest
The Cloud Forest at the highest elevations of El Yunque was indeed cloudy. Rainfall in this unique ecosystem exceeds 200 inches a year.
Ferry
After cleaning the rain forest mud off of our boots, the next day we took a ferry to the island of Vieques.
Free Time
Though Knight field trips are never a day at the beach, we were lucky enough to spend two hours at the beach as we waited for nightfall.
Bio Bay
The Bioluminescent Bay in Vieques is one of the brightest in the world. When you add the light bursts of 750,000 dinoflagellates per cubic foot of water together the effect is spectacular. The photos don't do it justice. It was a bright end to our trip before we returned to the snowy North.
