Check out this cool stroller. Not only does it look better than any baby-carrying device I’ve ever seen, but one wheel hub contains a generator that can charge you cell phone!
Monday, February 13, 2012
Origami
New Reality
“Have you ever walked around an 19th century (or earlier) graveyard? It gives you a depressing snapshot of the old reality: so many young women dead in childbirth, so many children reaped by diseases. We've been fortunate, we residents of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that so many of those lethal conditions are treatable, and we're mostly able to live without fear of our children dying in our arms.
But here in the United States, we may have been living in a brief window of time in which treatments are both available and affordable, and are moving into an era where they're available, but only the lucky top few percent are actually available to take advantage them.”
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Sore Finger
A National Geographic photographer shoots 20,000 to 60,000 images on assignment. Of those, perhaps a dozen will be published in the article.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
Armageddon
It has a small chance of happening anytime soon, but it’s worth preparing for:
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are using a 32,000 processor supercomputer to predict what would happen if we struck a large meter with an atomic weapon. This is in case we ever find one heading our way and need to do something to avoid a planet-wide extinction event. Above is the Itokawa asteroid, which is a half kilometer wide, meeting a 1 Megaton warhead in simulation.
Geonosians
One of Zach's favorite races in the Star Wars universe:
"According to Matthew Wood of Skywalker Sound, the sound the Geonosians make is 'the sound of two fruit bats fighting over a banana mixed with a penguin mating call.'"
White
The White MacBook is no more. Actually you couldn’t buy one in stores for a while, but now the school special version is dead too. No more white MacBooks…ours is a collector’s item!
Bonneville
The object in the lower left corner of this photo is the landing platform of the Spirit rover, sitting near Bonneville Crater on Mars. The Spirit rover landed here in 2004 and wandered towards the big crater. This image was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The rover is also in this picture, although it’s very hard to see. Spirit ceased to operate in 2010 and it sits forever on the edge of Bonneville.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
See Ya Later...
We love Swamp People. And when I say “we”, I mean all five of us. Not sure why…It could be the Cajun accents. Or the missing teeth. Or perhaps the head shots to alligators that splatter blood on the camera lens. Or the thought of raw chicken, allowed to rot in a cooler for a week in the hot sun. Or maybe, just maybe, knowing that there is a chance, no matter how slim, that one of these guys is going to fall in and be eaten by a 13-foot ‘gator.
Whatever it is, we watched all of season 1 in just a few days’ time.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Scary Gramma
I was in the dining room eating breakfast when I heard Brooke, who had recently completed her nightly migration to our bed, start screaming. A string of the most pathetic and terrifying sounds came from her little mouth and I could hear that she was clearly having a nightmare.
Turns out Heather had turned into a “scary gramma” for a few minutes. She “changed into other people” by some magic unknown to mankind. By the time I got upstairs, thankfully, Heather had changed back into cute mommy and all was well, but Brooke was still a little upset and clung to my hand just in case cute mommy had a relapse.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Fwogs
The kids are all digging a game called Pocket Frog on the iPad (lily pad?). It’s one of those games where you have to take care of your pets, in this case, frogs. You can let them hop around the pond, catch dragon flies, and you can breed them to produce interesting new colors and patterns.
The game has set amounts of time that must pass before certain things happen, for example, it take 20 mins (real world time) for frog eggs to hatch, and further time for the frogs to mature.
Brooke had played the game earlier in the day and loved playing with the little baby frogs, they are very tiny and very cute.
Later in the evening she played it again and was very distraught to see that her nursery was full of grown-up frogs.
She kept asking
“Where did my little baby fwogs go?”
Monday, February 6, 2012
Re-Testing
I’m a little nervous today, I have had some of my neurological symptoms get worse and I thought it would be a good idea to go to a new neurologist to get some answers, if there are any to get. So I had an appointment for tomorrow but the office called and moved it up to today. I’m not fully prepared yet, as I was going to get my medical history all in a neat timeline, and I don’t have my old medical records with me today. But I do want to get this over with so off I go.
I’ve had most of these issues for 8+ years and it’s been pretty steady for most of that time, with some periods of things getting worse, mostly, coincidentally or not, in the months of February and March.
I’m not looking forward to this, the testing and the waiting. And the re-testing and the re-waiting. I don’t handle that well. I’m actually going to the same office that Zach went to for his epilepsy, although I have a different neurologist.
I thought I’d look up the exact address of the place, just so I make sure I don’t miss it. I got the address from the office website, and checked out the bio of my new neuro.
It was a little disconcerting to read this blurb, featured prominently on the main page of the site:
“The three pounds of tissue in the human head is the brain.”
I don’t know whether I should feel relieved that they know that basic fact, or worried that they were so impressed with knowing that basic fact that they saw fit to brag about it. I would have preferred to have them say something like:
“We’re highly skilled neurologists with good degrees and we’re also very nice”
But as stated, their slogan is something that Brooke knows, and she’s three.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
5 Years!
I've been pouring my thoughts and feelings into this blog for five years now!
Do you still like it? Um...assuming you liked it in the first place :)
Friday, February 3, 2012
Anon
“As FBI and Scotland Yard investigators recently plotted out a strategy for tracking suspects linked to Anonymous, little did they know that members of the group were eavesdropping on their conference call and recording their plans.”
…and then they posted the conversation to the internet.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Oops!
“Pfizer has recalled 1 million packs of Lo/Ovral 28 and generic norgestrel/ethinyl estradiol birth control pills. The pills, which must be taken in the correct sequence, are mixed up.”
Looks like Pfizer’s gonna have to start coughing up for free college educations!
Lady & The Tramp
"Video:
All bark and all bite, Disney's magnificent frame-by-frame restoration and equally magnificent 1080p/AVC-encoded video transfer is, hands down, one of the finest animated classic presentations to roll out of the studio's doors. Everything, and I mean everything -- every hand-drawn line, splash of color, subtle personal touch, painted storybook background, and patch of scruffy fur -- almost looks as if it were animated yesterday, no small feat when it comes to a fifty-seven year old film.
Audio:
Now this is an audiophile's classic animation dream come true. Two excellent lossless options are available: an exacting DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 surround track and -- yes, dear purists -- a much-appreciated DTS-HD Master Audio 3.0 presentation of the film's original mix, restored and rejuvenated but otherwise unaltered. Both tracks are excellent, and only fall short when unjustly compared to the audio featured on Disney's recent feature film releases. The 7.1 remix is a whole new experience."
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
51st State
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by the USA, USSR, and the UK:
"The exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind;
Outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all States;
Outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means"
Sorry Newt. Can't build an all-American moon base like you promised. You can put a flag on the moon, but you cannot claim property on it, not a square millimeter. We're just going to have to cooperate with those "foreigners".
That Hair
"Subsurface scattering (or SSS) is a mechanism of light transport in which light penetrates the surface of a translucent object, is scattered by interacting with the material, and exits the surface at a different point. The light will generally penetrate the surface and be reflected a number of times at irregular angles inside the material, before passing back out of the material at an angle other than the angle it would have if it had been reflected directly off the surface. Subsurface scattering is important in 3D computer graphics, being necessary for the realistic rendering of materials such as marble, skin, and milk."
Picture: Direct surface scattering (left), plus subsurface scattering (middle), create the final image on the right.
This was used to spectacular effect in the Disney movie Tangled. And how about that hair?
"Many of the techniques and tools that were required to give the film the quality demanded did not exist when the project was started, and Disney Animation Studios had to create them on their own...
...Existing CGI technology continued to present difficulties: in particular, animating hair turned out to be a challenge. Senior software engineer Kelly Ward spent six years writing programs to make it move the way they wanted. As late as January 2010, the directors were still not sure if the Rapunzel character's length of hair was going to work. These problems were finally solved in March. An improved version of a hair simulation program named Dynamic Wires, originally developed for Bolt, was eventually used. To make hair float believably in water, and to surmount other similar challenges, discrete differential geometry was used to produce the desired effects, freeing the animators from executing these specific tasks directly, which would have taken days instead of minutes."
There are solid reasons why this was the most expensive animated film of all time. You could design and build a ship with the amount of time and expertise (oh, and 260 million dollars) thrown at this project.
Square
"President Barack Obama is no stranger to fundraising: his 2008 campaign drew a record-shattering $750 million in donations, and many expect his reelection efforts will result in a colossal war chest exceeding $1 billion come November. To aid in that lofty endeavor, Politico reports that campaign staffers with Android and iPhone handsets will soon be wielding Square credit card readers for collecting contributions on the go. Square units will allegedly be distributed to both Obama for America employees and volunteers nationwide."
Good move, I use Square in my photo business - it basically turns any iPhone into a mobile credit card register. Square was started by Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame. When he first cranked it up, the establishment hated it as you can imagine... especially those companies that made big money off credit card transactions and selling expensive readers and software. While many credit card accounts cost lots of money every month, Square is free, and the transaction fees are low. Can you imagine how much money you can rake in with a coordinated campaign like this. Unlike his republican rivals whose campaigns are financed by huge companies, Obama's campaigns are financed mostly by millions of grass-roots supporters, so this fits in perfectly with collecting lots of small transactions from lots of people.
It’s generally a shame that politics means money these days, but with that horrible “Citizens United” ruling a couple years back, the game has tilted even more in the favor of those with powerful friends and SuperPACs. I find it heartening that this plan with Square gives more voice to the little people. The ones who carry this country on their backs.
Goldfish
Funny story of the day:
ESCANABA, Mich. — Participants in a Michigan charity ice fishing tournament brought home a different kind of fish tale.
The Daily Press of Escanaba reports only one fish was caught by the more than 400 kids and adults participating in this weekend's Jig It Ice Fishing Extravaganza at Escanaba Yacht Harbor in the Upper Peninsula.
Big Brother Big Sisters of Delta County sponsored the fundraiser and Jason M. Pepin of Escanaba had the lone fishing success during the competition. The perch he caught weighed 4.5 ounces and netted a $3,000 first place prize.
The group's executive director Tanya Schuster says some people reported seeing fish swimming in the water, but they weren't biting.
Schuster says the event to help fund area mentoring programs is "more fun when you do catch fish."
Ya think?
Redmond, We Have A Problem
"Ilana Smith, a lead program manager on Microsoft's Engineering System team, has posted an article on MSDN explaining some of tweaks that have been made in Windows Explorer for the upcoming Windows 8 public beta in February. There are certainly those who have not taken well to the new ribbon interface, and to those opponents Smith says in no uncertain terms that they'll be sticking with the design.
For those who don't approve, she reminds them 'that there are third-party tools available' that can satisfy hardcore users."
Yep, that's Microsoft!
We know you hate that ugly-ass ribbon, but we don't care. You're gonna take it, and you're gonna like it!
Apparently they think they still have a monopoly on computing and can continue to treat their customers like final-stage lepers who have just crashed their black-tie dinner party. They continue to pump out one terrible product after another, assured that the customer has no option but to buy them.
Well guess what? Those days are over. "Good enough" is no longer good enough.
Yet, Microsoft seems to be the only party involved that doesn't acknowledge that fact.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Pancake
“Mozilla Labs has launched an ambitious new project dubbed Pancake. The goal is to question our very basic assumptions about what the web should be and, hopefully, create a better web in the process. If nothing else at least Mozilla now has a Director of Pancake.”
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Last Lions
Fifty years ago, a quarter of a million lions roamed the savannahs of Africa.
Today, they number about 10,000.
96% of the world’s wild lions have disappeared in the last half-century.
My children will almost certainly live to see the day when there are no more lions living in the wild. In fact, I might even live to see it.
Climatology
If you've wondered why we have missed half our winter:
"The jet stream is fueled by the North Atlantic and Arctic Oscillations, which are climate patterns determined by differences in sea-level pressure. A positive pressure difference, which is what we've been experiencing in the past few months, draws warm air from the southwest over the Eastern United States instead of cold air from the Arctic which is what happened last year and why tons of snow dumped on us.
Piling on the weather weirdness, La Niña conditions have pushed warm water toward Australia, decreasing Pacific Ocean temperatures off the U.S. to about 5 degrees lower than normal. That also means less precipitation, because colder water is less likely to evaporate..."
"The weather oscillations over the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Arctic have been off-the-charts extreme in recent years, likely driven at least in part by the precipitous decline in the volume of Arctic sea ice. This is something which warrants close attention and further study, and what happens with atmospheric patterns in the far north also directly affects weather to the south of there. An example of that is the past three winters including this one."
Meteorologists say the jet stream will oscillate back in the next few weeks giving us a wintery end to our non-winter.
"Danger, Will Robinson!"
"That does not compute"
2012 BX34
There’s an asteroid passing by Earth today, right about now I suppose. It’s the closest approach of a near-miss asteroid ever recorded, it will pass us at about 1/5 the distance to the moon, or within 50,000 miles.
This is a small one, about the size of a bus, so tiny it was only detected on Wednesday.
No chance it will hit the Earth, but nice to know I guess.
Graphene
This is a very new material (not even in my spell checker dictionary yet), created by forming carbon into a one-atom-thick honeycomb membrane. Scientists Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering it.
Most people have never heard of it, but it's going to be huge. And that's because Graphene has some amazing properties not found in any other material:
It's 100 times stronger than steel.
It conducts electricity as good as copper.
It is so thin it's transparent.
It conducts heat better than any material known to science.
It blocks the passage of all gasses but allows water vapor to pass through easily. This is not a small thing. Helium gas can leak through glass, but graphene stops it, while letting the much larger water vapor molecules through. This is very strange behavior for a material.
Graphene is called a 2-dimensional material, because it is one atom thick - basically as thin as anything you can make. When you roll it up it creates a 1-dimensional Nanotube.
The picture above is an electron microscope image of multiple layers of graphene lying atop each other like bed sheets.
You can just imagine the usefulness of a product like this. The semiconductor industry has big plans to use graphene in CPU and GPU units...it's a game changer, allowing the creation of transistors that are far smaller and far faster than anything yet constructed. You can create heat sinks. You can filter contaminants, or even distill alcohol with it. You can use it to support samples for electron microscope viewing because it is so thin and so strong and so clear. And Graphene is so resistant to so many materials, you can use it as a protective coating.
Development of these applications will take a few years, but they are surely coming.
And here's something very interesting...while Graphene was formally discovered in 2004 and is very difficult to manufacture perfectly, it is highly likely that you create it every time you use a graphite pencil. Some of the graphite flakes shed from pencils turn out to be single-atom-thick graphene sheets.
Innumerous
They say a lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. You have better odds of being killed by a lightning strike than winning a Powerball lottery.
If you are going to play the lottery, know that every number combination has the exact same chance of winning as any other. There are no privileged numbers.
Many people believe (I won’t use the word think) that a number that has already won somehow has less chance of winning again. Wrong. It has the exact same chance of winning again that any other number has of winning. It’s just that there are so many numbers available that the same number almost never wins again, it’s just statistics.
Same with any “lucky” number.
So people who are reasonably savvy tend to play numbers that nobody else will play. Why? Because, if you do win, you are less likely to have to split your winnings.
Well, 1,994 people never thought of that angle because they all played the number 666 and they all won. So they won, which is great for them, but had one person played 665 and had that number won, he or she would be walking away with somewhere around $783,000 instead of the $250 they’re getting now.
Last Minute
The Gmail logo… “was designed by Dennis Hwang (who's responsible for most of Google's doodles at the time) the night before Gmail launched.”
And, you can tell.
Urban Word: 501k
When one’s economic situation has become so tenuous that their entire net worth is in the pockets of their jeans.
“Sorry, bro, can’t go drinking tonight, the wife raided my 501k.”
Signed "Epstein's Mother"
Robert Hegyes has died. Epstein from one of my favorite shows when I was in middle school, Welcome Back Kotter.
Bridges
A few amazing facts that really show how a few long-lived people can bridge very far back in time...
"President John Tyler's grandsons are still alive!! That's right, two exclamation points because this blows my mind. John Tyler was the 10th President of the United States. He was born in 1790 and took office in 1841. His son, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, was born in 1853, when Tyler was 63 years old. Lyon had six children with two different wives, two of whom were Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr. (born 1924 when Lyon Sr. was 71) and Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born 1928 when Lyon Sr. was 75). They are reportedly both still living in their 80s."
"Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had, in his long lifetime, shaken hands with John Quincy Adams and John F. Kennedy"
And here's an interesting one: a witness to the Lincoln assassination appeared on a game show as a guest in 1956!
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Spirit of the Past
I took my lovely bride to see Keb’ Mo’ at the Royal Oak Music Theater last week.
Let me tell you, that old dude was fantastic. His band sounded great, his songs are as good as you’d expect from someone who has three Grammys under his belt, and the crowd loved him.
The really cool thing to me is that he is one of the very few blues guys who made it without watering down his sound. His songs are pure blues, without the influence of pop or country or rock or anything else.
We had fantastic seats too, I got online just as they went on sale – 4th row just off-center. Aside from the huge woman sitting next to me who took more than five agonizing minutes to get her coat off, smacking me at least ten times, our perch was perfect.
And here’s a known blues truth - when Keb’ Mo’ (Kevin Moore in case you didn’t get the slang) straps on a National Steel guitar and sings old time delta blues, you would swear you were looking at Son House brought back to life. Hell, come to think of it, Son is buried only ten miles away from that theater, in Mount Hazel Cemetery, so maybe…
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Mother
This is a small version of the highest resolution picture of the Earth ever taken, created from composites taken on January 4, 2012.
Tilted
Planets do not HAVE to have seasons. In fact, we have three planets in our system that do not: Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter.
Whether or not a planet has seasons is determined by its tilt, if any, relative to the sun. Planets that are not captured (ie, planets that are formed "in situ" within their solar systems) generally start out with no relative tilt, solidly spinning on an axis which is aligned to their star, and in the same plane (called the plane of the ecliptic).
But planets are always at risk of being hit by various bodies from space - meteors, comets, asteroids, etc. And some of these objects are very large. When a planet is unlucky enough to be hit by a really big one, say a large comet, the planet can be knocked off kilter and will start to precess (spin about a wobbly axis like a top). From that point on that planet will have seasons, as the tilt affects how much sunlight hits it and at what angle, throughout the year.
Big impacts like this are uncommon in the short term, but almost inevitable if given enough time. We know that the Earth has been hit multiple times in the last few hundred million years by objects large enough to create planet-wide ecosystem collapses and mass extinctions - these were impacts caused by meteors about 5-10km in diameter. It would take a much larger collision to knock the Earth into precession, and our season-causing event (SCE, I just coined that lol) probably happened early on in the Earth's history, when it was still very hot and had no life. In those early days when the solar system was forming, there were many more objects soaring around these parts and the chance of a really big impact would have been much greater.
The impact that tilted the Earth would have been the most violent event in its history, and probably also liquefied a great deal of its crust sending molten material into our orbit and beyond. Some scientists think our moon formed from that molten material - in other words, the moon may have condensed out of material ejected from Earth during this collision. One confirmation of this is that rocks originating on the Earth (yes, they can tell) have been found on the moon. That's funny when you think about it - we sent astronauts to the moon to go bring back a few little pieces of the Earth that we lost.
The Earth now has a tilt of about 23.5 degrees, which gives us well defined seasons in most areas. Planets that have no seasons generally just lucked out and missed being hit.
Mars, Saturn, and Neptune all have tilts about the same as the Earth and they all have seasons of about the same severity.
And then there is Uranus. Poor Uranus. Uranus was the first planet discovered by telescope, in 1781. Today we know that something very, very traumatic happened to Uranus a long time ago, and that poor gas giant will never be the same.
Uranus, you see, has been whacked all the way over. It has a tilt of 98 degrees, and it's north and south poles are in the orientation of most planets equators. So it rotates perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. The effect of this is that Uranus has very strange seasons:
"Other planets can be visualized to rotate like tilted spinning tops on the plane of the Solar System, while Uranus rotates more like a tilted rolling ball. Near the time of Uranian solstices, one pole faces the Sun continuously while the other pole faces away. Only a narrow strip around the equator experiences a rapid day-night cycle, but with the Sun very low over the horizon as in the Earth's polar regions. At the other side of Uranus's orbit the orientation of the poles towards the Sun is reversed. Each pole gets around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of darkness. Near the time of the equinoxes, the Sun faces the equator of Uranus giving a period of day-night cycles similar to those seen on most of the other planets."
Uranus has huge storms, propelled by the dramatic temperature gradients, with wind speeds that often break the sound barrier (we complain about 35 mph winds, imagine 560 mph winds!)
Being knocked down flat is pretty embarrassing, but Venus actually got it worse than Uranus. You may note that above it says that Venus does not have seasons, and that is true. But that's only because when Venus' time came to pay the piper it was knocked all the way around, head over heels. Crazy as it sounds, Venus is upside down. Its North pole is on the bottom and it rotates in the opposite direction as the other planets. That's why the graphic above lists its tilt at 177 degrees. So I guess Venus lucked out to have been hit so hard and still not get seasonality.
As with most properties of our Goldilocks Earth, we have seasons that are in between "none" and "severe". Just right.
8 Years
Talk about getting our money’s worth. The Opportunity mars rover has now been wheels down on Mars for eight years, and she’ still going. While Her sister Spirit is now gone, Opportunity continues to send us data and pictures, move around, and expand our knowledge of the red planet.
“Greeley Haven is Opportunity's current workplace, an outcrop with a Sun-facing slope that will allow the aging rover to soak up solar power during its fifth Martian winter*. Within reach of the rover's robotic arm are plentiful sites for scientific investigation, including inspection of mineral compositions and textures within the outcrop. A full-circle colour panorama is also on the schedule along with a radio science experiment that will record information about the tiny wobbles in Mars' rotation to provide insight into the planet's interior.”
Eight years of service is not bad for a rover designed to last 90 days. And she’s not through yet.
*What gives, you ask? Why five winters? Because the Mars year is 687 Earth days, or 1.88 Earth years. That means that although the rovers have been on Mars eight Earth years, they have been there for less than five Mars years. Same amount of absolute time of course.
No Snow
“Typically by now, metro Detroit averages 21 inches of snow. So far this season, only 13 inches of snow has fallen at Metro Airport, 8 inches below normal.”
I don’t think we’ve even gotten 5 inches total at our house. Maybe less. And I’m ok with that. I miss AZ more every winter. My great mission in life is to find a way to be able to retire in Cali.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
The Whole Package
"Apple has a secret room devoted solely to designing product packaging and what users experience when opening a new product...the packaging room is located in a walled-off section of the company's main marketing building.
In the room, employees perform the most mundane of tasks -- opening boxes. It is said that one packaging designer spent months in the room doing just that, opening hundreds of iPod box prototypes trying to get the experience just right.
How a customer opens a box must be one of the last things a typical product designer would consider, yet for Apple, the inexpensive box merits as much attention as the high-margin electronic device inside.
Showing attention to detail at even the smallest level communicates to customers that the manufacturer cares about them. Customers then feel a bond with the company, something that transcends price points."
Anyone who has ever opened an Apple product box knows this, they are obsessive about the presentation and packaging of their products, and it shows.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Eating
(watching Fantastic Mr Fox, when the fox eats breakfast - very messy with lots of growling)
Dad: "That fox eats like a wild animal"
Brooke: "He IS a wild animal. And a father and a husband"
That's an exact line from later in the movie
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Friday, January 20, 2012
Light Show
As you know, I have a great love for science and cosmology. I seem to have a very technical side that enjoys unraveling mysteries, or at least following the work of those who do so.
But I also love beautiful things, and very often the tools and findings of science are beautiful themselves, even as they reveal the beauty of the universe.
A great example of this beauty is pictured above. The twin Keck telescopes which are perched atop an extinct volcano called Mauna Kea on the big island of Hawaii, at an elevation of 14,000 feet.
The Kecks are masterful designs, true testaments to human creativity. And they are also beautiful. From the graceful domes that protect their delicate instruments to the huge sectioned hexagonal mirrors at their hearts, they just leave me in awe. And can you think of a more beautiful location? They don’t sit there just so astronomers can work in a paradise though, Mauna Kea is a perfect location for a telescope: high elevation to minimize atmospheric distortion, no close mountains to stir up the air, very clear skies, and a thousand miles of temperature-moderating ocean all around to provide stability.
These instruments are designed to “see” in both the optical and near-infrared parts of the spectrum. The 36-section hexagonal aluminosilicate ceramic mirrors are the largest optical/Infrared mirrors in the world.
The two Kecks can work together to form what is called an astronomical interferometer with an effective mirror size of 279 feet, or they can each take observations separately.
The Kecks have one amazing feature that sets them apart from other telescopes and it’s an awesome piece of technology. Because of manufacturing issues and the warping effect of gravity on large heavy objects, segmented mirror designs are needed to produce mirrors larger than about 200 inches (the previous largest telescope, which held that title for many years, was the 200 inch Hale at Mt Palomar). So the Keck uses a set of 36 hexagonal mirrors interlocked to make one big mirror. But these mirrors have to be aligned to each other nearly perfectly. An alignment error of 1 millionth of an inch would be catastrophic to the observation. The Kecks have the most advanced alignment and drive mechanism of any telescope. The mirrors are aligned by a computer that checks their relative heights in hundreds of places twice every second. Minute corrections are made nearly instantly to bring the mirrors into alignment.
That’s all amazing, but there’s more. Because these mirrors can move independently, they can also be used to correct for atmospheric disturbances that hinder the clarity of all ground-based telescopes. The initial design of this system worked like this: the telescope has an optical sensor that locks on to a bright star (which is called the guide star) close to the site in the sky being observed. By measuring the changes in the brightness of the guide star caused by atmospheric disturbances, the system can calculate the corrections required in the mirrors and send that information to the mirror alignment computer which then corrects for them. This is called Adaptive Optics, and as implemented it was an ingenious system but it had a huge limitation: only about 1% of the sky is close enough to a star bright enough to use as the guide star. So the system was re-imagined in a very novel way
The Keck telescopes can now create their own guide stars.
“In the upper part of the Earth's mesosphere (90±10 km altitude), there is a 5-10 km thick layer rich in Sodium atoms, deposited by the ablation of micrometeorites. These atoms can be excited and caused to radiate by spontaneous emission by projecting a pulsed laser tuned to the Sodium D atomic transition (589 nm) in the direction of the science target.”
 |
| Laser Guide Star (LR) |
So, using powerful lasers, the telescope can excite particles in the extreme upper atmosphere to the point that they radiate light. This light can be used as a substitute guide star for correcting atmospheric disturbances. It’s genius. This new system is called LGS AO (Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics). You will notice that the guide star laser is a pretty orange-yellow color – that’s the color of a laser tuned to the 589 nm wavelength as needed to cause this effect on Sodium.
LGS AO works so well that the Keck telescopes now routinely produce images that are sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Kecks have produced some of the greatest discoveries in astronomy during the last decade, including the discoveries of more planets than any other instrument, including the Kepler spacecraft.
All that and of course, I think they really are beautiful to look at.
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