Event 3: Contact Viewing Party
Last week, on Thursday I think, I attended the watch party for the 1997 Robert Zemeckis movie Contact, starring Jodie Foster as Eleanor Arroway and Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss (IMDb). The movie begins with the young and hopeful Ellie as she speaks with people from across the continental United States with a HAM radio, a predecessor to her work in using radio frequencies and satellites to contact aliens. I'm not particularly interested in providing a more detailed synopsis of the film, nor am I really going to be talking about the final acts which have too much fiction and and not enough science for my taste. I also don't care for the the human drama aspect of the film, since that's not at all relevant to the course or the nature of this blog post. Very Large Array in New Mexico https://public.nrao.edu/telescopes/vla/ I did, however, notice some interesting things when watching the film, the first being that the broadcast was sent to the center of the Vega system. Veg...