You thought we were an "unimaginative lot"...

[Armada]

While this is unrelated to pirates, I just had to mention what I saw in recent news. It puts pirates' 'unimaginative' names to shame.

Apparently, astronomers at the VLA are looking for suggestions from the public for a better name, to celebrate the completion of a long-running renovation project.
The VLA is a large array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, US, and is famous for appearing in films such as Contact and Independence Day.
So, what does VLA stands for? 'Very Large Array'. I'm not kidding; here's the BBC news article: http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-15307169

A couple of snippets from the article read:

The astronomy community has a long history of descriptive yet fairly unimaginative names - including the VLA itself, the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and the yet-to-be-built European Extremely Large Telescope (the design for which was chosen over the alternative Overwhelmingly Large Telescope).

...

By way of warning, the Science and Environment desk's entry will be the "Unfeasibly Large Telescopes", so that one is taken.

Honestly, it's no wonder they've asked the public for help. Even us pirates could come up with a better name that that! :

 

[rupertlittlebear]

"Size Matters"

 

[Thagarr]

I saw this the other day as well, it is pretty sad that people that smart can't come up with creative names for anything, they are fairly good with acronyms though!

This one is a bit redundant, but best I could do at 3 am!

AERIAL

Advanced Extraterrestrial Radio Interpolation Astrognosy Lacis

 

[Armada]

That's certainly good for 3am!

I think this is the problem with astronomers: they're so busy being clever that they don't have time to be creative when naming all their clever telescopes.