Posted by Pat Daukantas, OPN senior writer/editor
Many of the articles I write for OPN originate either from OSA meetings or from phone interviews I conduct from my office at OSA headquarters in Washington, D.C. However, for my cover story in the September issue, I had the chance to attend the most recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu and visit one of the world’s major astronomical meccas: the giant telescopes on Mauna Kea.
I left on Sunday, May 27, and spent the rest of the day traveling to Honolulu. The conference started the next day, which was Memorial Day. The AAS meets on a semiannual basis, and generally its summer meetings are smaller than its winter meetings. There were about 1,200 registrants, including press. So this conference was roughly comparable to OSA’s Annual Meeting in size.
My stint at AAS
On Memorial Day, I attended a number of sessions, including an invited talk by cosmologist John Tonry on sky surveys and the future of astronomy. A sky survey is a series of wide-field images of as large a portion of the night sky as possible, archived for the astronomical community to use in future research projects.
For decades, the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, taken on glass photographic plates with the 48-in. Oschin Schmidt Telescope during the 1950s, was the gold standard in optical sky mapping. In recent years, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) have been bringing terabytes of optical and infrared data to the astronomical community.
Now there are several current and future projects out there to extend the sky surveys into the Southern Hemisphere and in specialized directions. In addition to the scientific benefits, these sky surveys give useful work to some telescopes that aren’t quite as big as the world-class 8-m telescopes I wrote about in my OPN article.
Some of these surveys will also use new technology, such as Pan-STARRS, which will use the world’s largest digital cameras. Here is an image of a test camera for Pan-STARRS that was on display in the AAS exhibit hall:
In this photo, you can see me in the real-time image display on the right-hand computer:
While at the AAS meeting, I did a sit-down interview with Richard Green, director of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory. The LBT uses much different technology from the twin Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea. I also conducted a phone interview with Geoff Marcy of UC Berkeley, whose team searches for exoplanets around nearby stars. Geoff couldn’t attend the AAS meeting because he was in the middle of an observing run on the Keck telescope. However, he graciously made himself available to the AAS press corps during a convenient time in the Hawaiian time zone when he should have been sound asleep.
Speaking of the press corps, I must say “thank you” to Steve Maran, AAS press officer since 1985. At many past AAS meetings, Maran has arranged off-site trips for reporters covering the conferences. At my first AAS meeting in Boston in January 1989, Maran escorted reporters on a tour of the Itek Optical Systems plant in Lexington, Mass., where the mirror blanks for the first Keck telescope were being ground, polished and tested. University of California Observatories astronomer Jerry E. Nelson, the driving force behind the Keck design, had explained in great detail the then-untested idea that 36 actively adjusted hexagonal mirrors could form one 10-m-aperture primary optical element.
For this year’s AAS press trip on May 31, Peter Michaud, the Gemini Observatory’s public information outreach director, also worked extensively to make sure that staff members from the various telescopes would be on hand that afternoon to show us reporters around, answer questions and make sure that we didn’t die of altitude sickness at 13,700 feet.
The trip to Mauna Kea
We started our “Mauna Kea day” with a light breakfast at the ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center, a cool new science museum for the public in Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii. Hilo, a cozy city of about 40,000, has the closest airport to Mauna Kea.
Several astronomers, including Min Yun of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (one of my alma maters) and Michael Liu of the University of Hawaii, described the research they are doing at the various Mauna Kea observatories. We saw a brief planetarium show that integrated traditional Hawaiian tales with modern cosmology, which was of particular interest to the people on the press tour who do planetarium shows and other public outreach activities. Then we were divided up into three groups for the long, slow uphill drive in three rented four-wheel-drive vehicles.
We stopped for lunch at Hale Pohaku, a.k.a. the Onizuka Center for International Astronomy, which is the “midway” acclimatization stop on the single road to the summit of Mauna Kea. (At 9,600 feet, it’s higher up than a lot of observatories in the southwestern United States.) It’s also the place where astronomers sleep in darkened cabins between their observing nights and where the public can gaze through small telescopes on clear nights. Rangers reminded us of the dangers inherent in breathing air that has 40 percent less oxygen than “normal” and had us sign liability waivers for the various institutions that run the telescopes. Then it was back into the vans for the trip up the washboard dirt road, which became paved again as we got closer to the summit (so that less dirt is kicked up near the telescopes).
My group visited the Submillimeter Array, the Gemini North telescope, and the Keck telescopes.
R. Scott Fisher, an outreach scientist with the Gemini Observatory, and staff members of individual telescopes described what we were looking at. This photo shows the Gemini telescope with the dome slit open.
This one shows it while it was rotating on its mount as part of the daily pre-observing testing.
On the way to the twin Keck observatories, whose domes are connected by a single building, we saw more thrilling panoramas.
The Keck’s mirrors are made up of hexagonal mirror segments, so we got to see where the extra mirrors were stored:
We also saw where they are realuminized:
For me, this was a fitting complement to that January 1989 AAS press tour. Space was cramped inside the Keck dome, so it was harder to take photographs, but I did manage a shot of the computer-controlled actuator system that keeps the mirror segments aligned.
I also took pictures of other observatories that I didn’t get to visit up close, such as the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory.
You can see from this photo I took on the way down from the summit that we were way above the clouds!
At sunset, we went back to Hale Pohaku for dinner and talks by the directors of the Keck Observatory and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. We were back at the hotel 13 hours after departure.
I really appreciate the opportunity that I had to go on this journey of discovery. Mahalo (thank you) to all who helped make it possible!
Posted by Joseph Shaw, Montana State University
The 9th International Meeting on Light and Color in Nature was held at Montana State University in Bozeman, Mont., from June 25-29, 2007. Topics of the presentations included rainbows, fogbows, halos, auroras, sky colors, optical displays visible in algal films on water and more. Participants at the 2007 meeting came from all over the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Finland and Denmark. We hope that future meetings will draw participation from even more countries around the world.
This is a truly unique meeting that focuses on optical phenomena that are observable with the naked eye in the world around us. The meetings began in 1978 and have taken place approximately every three years since. There are no parallel sessions and all participants attend every talk. Significant scientific contributions are made at each meeting, and the results are published in a feature issue of an OSA journal following the conference. For example, in recent years the “Light and Color in the Open Air” feature issues of Applied Optics have been some of the most popular single issues.
The 2007 meeting included a group tour of Yellowstone National Park, where we enjoyed viewing the wonderful and varied colors of the thermal features, geology, and other natural aspects of the park. This photo is of the group at the Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone Park.
For more information, please see http://www.optec.montana.edu/light&color2007.html or contact Dr. Joseph Shaw at jshaw@montana.edu.
Posted by Christina Folz, OPN managing editor
This summer, I headed north for a few days to attend the Council of Engineering and Scientific Society Executives (CESSE) in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The meeting gave me insight into news and trends in scholarly communication that you may find of interest.
One of the sessions, titled “Public Access to Research: Grappling with this Megatrend,” provided an informative follow-up to the Policy Matters article on open access publishing that appeared in the June 2007 OPN. The OPN article described legislation introduced last year by Texas Republican John Cornyn and Connecticut Democrat (now Independent) Joseph Lieberman that would require the results of much federally funded research to be posted online for free.
The bill—the Federal Research Public Access Act—expired last year. However, as I learned at CESSE, it was recently reintroduced to the 110th Congress. The legislation passed the House of Representatives on July 19 and is now under consideration by the Senate, which may make a decision as soon as September or October of this year.
Currently, the legislation is specific to research funded by the National Institutes of Health. However, as the OPN article describes, researchers from many scientific disciplines, along with scholarly publishers, are concerned about establishing a precedent for government mandates that could affect the quality, funding and economics of scientific research and communication. On the other hand, many librarians and patient advocates are supportive of the bill, citing the growing cost of subscriptions and patients’ right to access publicly funded research.
At another session, I learned about scitopia, a federated vertical search engine that was recently developed by 15 leading scientific and technical societies (including OSA). These societies came together to design a search that provides direct access to peer-reviewed journal content and technical conference papers—without the noise of other Internet search engines.
More than three million documents spanning 150 years of scientific and technological communication can be searched through the site, which always turns up the “version of record.” The site is openly available to the public, although most of the scientific content is not free.
Partners in the project include the Acoustical Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Vacuum Society, the Electrochemical Society, IEEE, the Institute of Physics Publishing, the Optical Society of America, SPIE, the Society of Automotive Engineers and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Other organizations will be invited to join as the project progresses.
I also attended an interesting session on journal citations and impact factors, where I learned that Thomson Scientific is interested in pursuing new measures for evaluating journals. In addition to its well-known impact factor, which gauges how highly cited a publication is, Thomson is looking into metrics that can track usage data (downloads, etc.) and the extent to which scholars are publishing in certain journals.
Hawk Eye Makes It Harder for Players to “Pull a McEnroe"
Posted by Christina Folz, OPN managing editor
The rules have changed since that fateful Wimbledon match in 1981, when John McEnroe threw his racquet on the court and yelled at the chair umpire: “You cannot be serious!” Now, when players dispute the line calls at major tournaments, officiators can simply smile and let the ball speak for itself — sort of.
Earlier this year, Wimbledon became the third grand-slam tennis event to adopt a new technology called the Hawk Eye, a system that uses a series of cameras and computers to create virtual replays of disputed calls. The system has introduced a breathtaking level of accuracy into the officiating of the game: During testing by the International Tennis Federation, Hawk Eye was found to have made the correct call in 100 percent of all tests, with an average error of just 3.6 mm.
The system, which is available only for stadium courts, relies on input from multiple high-speed video cameras that capture the path of the ball at a rate of 50 frames per second. Each camera feeds the information into a computer, which uses vision processing to determine the exact center of the ball in each frame. The system compensates for camera movement by also tracking the lines of the court. The two-dimensional information gathered from each camera’s computer is then fed into a mainframe, and the system triangulates the information from each calibrated position to determine the 3-D position of the ball.
This process is repeated for each frame, and the 3-D positions are combined to create a simulation of the trajectory of the ball and determine exactly where it bounced. The ball’s path is transmitted directly to the high-definition screens above the court, so the crowd can find out the resolution of a disputed call at the same moment that the players do.
In matches that have adopted the Hawk Eye system, players typically have two chances per set to challenge calls made by chair umpires, with an extra challenge afforded to each player in the event of a tiebreak. If a player challenges a call and the Hawk Eye simulation shows he is incorrect, he loses one of his challenges. However, if Hawk Eye finds that the player made the right call—and the umpire made the wrong one—the player preserves that challenge opportunity.
According to statistics from the 2006 U.S. Open, only 30.1 percent of men’s challenges, and 35.9 percent of women’s, were upheld after the Hawk Eye was invoked. It’s impossible to know whether McEnroe threw his racquet in vain in his 1981 match against Tom Gullikson—but it’s probably safe to say that at least some of the anger he expressed toward umpires over the years should have been redirected at another source: himself.
More Information
The Hawk Eye Sensors site lets you play umpire. See how well you can judge the calls at: http://www.hawkeyesensors.com/judge.cfm
Popular Science offers a Web exclusive on the Hawk Eye system and a photo gallery that shows how the system works: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/01b844f7a848d010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
The Hawk Eye Innovations Ltd. provides more information about the technology and its applications in tennis, cricket and something called “snooker”: http://www.hawkeyeinnovations.co.uk/