A Big Dish at the VLA Radio Observatory . ... Together, the 27 dishes of the VLA combine high sensitivity with high resolution, enabling a series of important astronomical discoveries, including water ice on planet Mercury , micro-quasars in our Galaxy , gravitationally-induced Einstein rings around distant galaxies , and radio counterparts to cosmologically distant gamma-ray bursts . Pictured above, a dish from the VLA was photographed last week near Socorro , New Mexico , USA. ...