Correction

All week I've been thinking about those rings in the desert. How could it be Burning Man Festival when that doesn't even start for another three weeks? Plus, did we really fly that far north over Nevada? And, what are those rectangle things on the left? Still, I tried uploading my photo for a Google image search, and it turned up nothing. I had previously tried several search terms with no luck.

"Who knows what it was," my brother told me; "the government has a lot of weird shit in the desert."

I had almost (almost) forgotten about it when I went to check Heidi's flight last night. I wanted to see exactly where she was so I used a site that shows the live progress of any commercial plane. As I watched the tiny icon creep across the map, I wondered if I could find our flight path from 10 days before. It turns out that I certainly could, AND I could also view that map as a satellite image.

As before, my touchstone was Mono Lake, an unmistakable landmark that I saw just a few minutes after the strange array. I followed the neon green dotted line backwards through Nevada scouring the image for anything that might possibly give me a clue. The only concrete signposts were the Grand Army of the Republic Highway and a town called Tonopah.

Finally I searched for "concentric rings nevada desert tonopah" and at last I found what I was looking for. It turns out that what I saw was the Crescent Dunes Solar Plant. It isn't up and running yet, but when it is, it will be the world's most advanced solar station.

What looked like circles from the air was actually more than seventeen thousand ground-mounted mirrors called heliostats. They collect solar energy and focus it on that central tower, which is full of salt. The heat melts the salt and it goes down to power a steam turbine, which generates electricity. The molten salt also stores energy in the form of heat, functioning like a kind of battery that can continue to produce steam and electricity for up to ten hours beyond when the mirrors are collecting sunlight. It is projected to fully power 75,000 homes a year.

Cool! Evidently, there's a lot more burning out there in the desert than just the man.