Sol Friedman House

Transcription

What do you think of a sunny morning in Buffalo? It’s kind of cool for this, ha? Great, I’m here to talk with you about the Sun. That’s my subject for today. I want you to fasten your seat belts, because we are going to take a trip. It's going to last 18 minutes and take you about half a billion miles and then back again. I'll have you back in time for the next speaker. So enjoy. I’m going to talk with you about sunlight, because that’s what I take pictures of. I do that because I’m in the city of Buffalo and I cannot take pictures of dim fuzzy things, and galaxies, and clusters and beautiful things — you have to go out to the country for that. But I live off Elmwood Avenue, so I’m going to show you some of my work and talk with you a little bit about why I do it, or why I think I do it. Sunlight is everything for us in the Solar System. It gives us our energy and it lights up everything that we can see, including the Moon at night and the Moon during the daytime. You know that the Moon can be seen during the day, right? This is my observatory. It’s in my backyard. Again, about a hundred feet from Elmwood Avenue. That’s my big telescope; it’s a 10-inch. It's taking pictures [of] that Sun spots there. And if you look closely, you can see me under the dome. That dome is made by my wife Donna who is a costume designer. It’s black on the inside and silver lamé on the outside, because everybody looks better in silver lamé. (Laughter) This is the view from my backyard. It’s not what you would call an ideal place for astronomy. It's got telephone wires. It's got power lines. It's got Cable TV lines. It’s got cable TV antennas. It’s got transformers, and trees and rooftops, all sorts of stuff that I have to shoot around. So it’s kind of a hurdle to get through it. But every once in a while I’m able to get a good shot. This is one on my earliest photographs. It’s a picture of sunlight by courtesy of our Moon and courtesy of Earth. The bright area is obviously the crescent Moon lit by sunshine, and the dark area is illuminated because we have earthshine, which is light bouncing off the Earth and illuminating the darker side of the Moon. I take pictures of the planets. Jupiter, magnificent with its bands and great red spot, which is a 500-year-old storm, at least 500 years old, maybe older. And its moon Io. Venus, which is glorious, mysterious, beautiful, enshrouded in carbon dioxide atmosphere. It’s what we’re trying to keep the Earth from becoming. I take a lot of close-up pictures of the Moon at high noon, and also right before nightfall when the shadows are long. This picture is called "Goodnight Moon". I named it after that book. I guess you guys have read it. Some of you are old enough to have children. This is one of my cameras. I use a webcam to take my pictures, and you’ll see more about that in a little while. This is a very fast little camera. It's a little different than the one in your computer that you use to Skype with your kids. But it’s very similar too. It takes a 120 frames a second. No switches on it. It’s all controlled on the computer and I don't know, it’s just a really, really cool little device. Its industrial use is to take pictures of license plates going through red lights in the States that allow such intrusions on civil liberties. So this is the view through my telescope. You might wonder what it’s like, and this is just what it’s like. You’re looking at a dead Moon. It hasn’t changed in 500 million years pretty much. But the movement you’re seeing is our atmosphere. And that’s the big thing I have to contend with. How do you take a picture with the camera and snap it just at the right moment? Let’s try and stop it. Uph, that’s a pretty good frame. That’s a pretty good frame. Now see, I’d never be able to catch these good frames. I would get blurry frames if I tried. There's one. So this is what you get if you try and snap with the camera. You get a frame that looks like that. But imagine if we could go to this video, and just pull the sharp frames out of here and use just the sharp frames to make a picture. That’s a technique called "lucky imaging". Almost all my pictures are taken that way. I’m going to tell you a little bit more about how it’s done. So this is not my observatory. This is on the Canary Islands, La Palma. It’s the Nordic Optical Telescope. It’s a 100-inch mirror, which is more than 8 feet, big telescope. This is a picture taken by the Nordic Optical Telescope in 1990. At the time, it was one of the sharpest pictures ever taken of Saturn from Earth. This is a picture taken 15 years later from my backyard in downtown Buffalo, using "lucky imaging". And it really has advanced what we're able to do as amateurs, or as I like to call us "citizen astronomers". I've monitored Saturn over a period of 6 years, so we could watch the ring tilts and made it into a little movie, which is a fun way to explain our relationship with Saturn as we go through our different orbits in space. We can enjoy the change in the perspective of Saturn from our location. So this is pretty cool. These are nice pictures. But NASA has not been asleep. It's got a satellite that is zooming in and out of the ring system of Saturn, its spectacular imagery — the Cassini Mission. If you haven’t seen it, friend them on Facebook. Go to their website. They’re the most breathtaking images of the Solar System that you’ve ever seen. I can take some interesting pictures of the solar atmosphere and the chromosphere. Layer here is a prominence, which is being pushed away from the Sun by the solar wind. It's pretty cool, but I have to point out that we’ve got 2 spaceships orbiting the Sun now, the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Can you see the little hair? No you can't. It's too dim. There’s a little hair in front of the sensor. But aside from that, it takes pictures 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, every day of the year — the entire Sun. Nothing escapes Solar Dynamics Observatory. It is breathtaking imagery, also. The question comes up: why bother? I mean, why stay up at night? Why get into work late in the morning to do this work? So I want to talk with you a little bit about why I do it. Why you might want to do it. One of the things is — it's gorgeous. Looking through a telescope is a mind-blowing experience. Have any have you ever seen Saturn through a telescope? Nobody? There's one. When you see Saturn through a telescope, it will change your life, and lead you on a long journey of buying telescopes and what we call "aperture fever". It’s a very dangerous thing to do. I do look through this telescope often too. This is my little baby. It's called "Little Big Man". It's my solar telescope. It’s got a hydrogen-alpha filter on the front and a camera on the back. So what can we do with this thing? One of the things we can do, is we can take pictures of things that are very rare. Here’s the transit of Venus. Did anybody see the transit of Venus? Good! It was visible from Buffalo. Great. There’s not going to be another one for more than 100 years. So if you didn't see it, you'll have to watch it on TV, or eat a very low fat diet to have a chance to see it in 110 years. You can see really brief things, like this space station silhouetted in front of the Sun. This happened down in Florida. I happened to be in the right place, at the right time and the transit took 2/5th of a second. So I had to really hit it at the right moment. Video helps with that. The other thing we can do is, we can explore art. This is what the Sun looks like in hydrogen-alpha light, taken with a black and white camera. This is the chromosphere of the Sun, the atmosphere of the Sun. But, there’s ways to transform this, so that it becomes an interesting story that tells other pictures. We can colorize it. We can invert the values, so that different aspects of the solar atmosphere are seen better. We can record things in different ways to tell the story of the Sun like it’s journalism, but always remaining true to the aspect of the Sun, so that we’re not really making up data, we're just telling a different story. I like to think of myself as a photojournalist, because I always grapple with what’s real and what’s true, and what is fair to do and what’s not fair to do. It’s an interesting dilemma and it’s related to art, but a little bit different as well. Those are filaments on the surface of the Sun. Their prominence is seen against the disk. And there is the Venus transit, which I had the privilege of recording from Mount Wilson Observatory. Really wonderful place to go. Eighteen miles outside and 1 mile up from Los Angeles. And if we widen the view a little bit, we can see a little bit of the atmosphere of the Sun. Here — another prominence being launched into space from the solar wind, its magnetism let go. And sometimes we take pictures because the site is just extraordinary. Picture this prominence here. This solar prominence is 200,000 miles long. Pretty much the distance form the Earth to the Moon. And if you play croquet and you had an Earth-size croquet ball, you could tap it through the smaller loop on the left. I was able to use "lucky imaging" to sharpen this nicely, and then put a black disk in front of the Sun, so that you can see the fine detail better. I'm seeing here, looking at my feet, because that’s where the pictures are. And then adding the chromospheric detail on the surface, which involves another exposure. So this is a double exposure, really, image, and it tells the story of the Sun that day. So prominences, they're amazing things. They’re different every day. Some of them last a long time, like the one you just saw. This one died really quickly. It collapsed. It's about 100,000 miles high, and the solar gravity pulled it back into the solar surface, so that within a half hour there was nothing left of it. I was able to hang out that morning and watch this very exciting, beautiful thing. And if you've got enough time, you can make movies. Movies help us understand stuff on the Sun that we can’t really tell from a still picture. You know the prominences have that looping kind of quality, right? But, they don’t always face us that way. We're not always looking at them nice and so we can see the magnetic fields. This on is going like this. And you can see it from the motion of the video. There’s solar plasma, really heavy hydrogen stuff, being thrown backwards over the shoulder, like a continental soldier, showing you the true looping character of this prominence. And we can just capture beautiful stuff. Prominences are gorgeous. Each one is different. I love to tell their stories and look at each one, and process it differently, so that it shows a different aspect of the Sun. All of them real, but colorized differently. I've taken hundreds of these things over the last several years. Someday I’m going to have an exhibit where I mount them wall sized, small images, so you can enjoy them all. The other thing that’s cool about these things, is they look like stuff. This is obviously a Scottie dog prominence. Right? This is the phenomenon known as "pareidolia". That’s our tendency to see ourselves and stuff where we don’t really exist, but we like to feel that we’re at the center of things. So maybe, that’s how astrology got started, I don’t know. But it's how we can see Jackie Gleason's face in the beginning of The Honeymooners in the Moon. So here’s one of my favorites. Anybody know what this is? Yell it out, if you do. (Audience) Kangaroo. AF: Kangaroo. That’s not right. This is what it is, it's Big Foot. (Laughter) And this is one of my favorite old pictures, one of the first dramatic prominences I was able to catch, and what I love about this picture is it was chosen among 99 pictures, almost all of them from the Hubble Space Telescope and other professional observatories. But a few amateur images were selected from the Earth of the Universe, which traveled the world during the International year of Astronomy in 2009, and it went to all these countries that we either know very little about, or we don’t speak to civilly, except when we're speaking the language of science, which is a universal friendly language. So the other thing that we do with this stuff is we share it. Like, I’m sharing it with you. I share my images in a number of places. This is the Sun spot I was capturing in that first picture of my big telescope in my backyard. And it was featured on the Astronomy Picture of the day, which I hope you bookmark. It’s a great site that’s run by a couple of NASA scientists. Always a wonderful picture, and always some science copy to go along with it. I’ve been very fortunate to have a number of images featured on this site. I want to walk you through this story, this little adventure that I had with this picture, which I took October 20th 2010, just almost 2 years ago. And it was captured right before Holloween. I colorized it a little differently than I normally do, and I inverted the surface. It was one of my first experiments with this type of imaging. And I sent it over to the Astronomy Picture of the Day, because the name of it is: "It’s not the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown". I had a name for it, the color. It’s the perfect Holloween image. Right? But it wasn’t the Astronomy Picture of the day. They chose a Hubble Space Telescope picture of the ghost nebula, which was OK. I was a little peeved. But it was just fine. But it did get picked up by a great blogger named Jason Major who writes for this blog LightsInTheDark. He also blogs the Discovery Channel and National Geographic. He shared it with another influential guy at Discover, Phil Plait who has his own TED talk, which you should look up. He’s a great skeptic and a great writer. He said some really nice things about this picture. So, then all of a sudden, a funny thing happened. It sort of went, what they call, "viral" I guess — I have never had a viral experience outside of bed. But this was everywhere. It went to NPR. I had an interview on NPR. It was on the Huffington Post. It went to all sorts of media. The picture appeared on Harley Davidson blogs, paranormal blogs, Martial arts website. Even the Daily Mail in the UK took a couple days off from their Princes to cover my pictures. (Laughter) I just couldn’t get over this. It was in a major newspaper in Italy. And this newspaper from Russia, that I’m sorry I can’t tell you the name of, but It had a lot of activity. That’s a number there 590,42 — it’s a big number. I don’t’ know what number it is exactly. So here I am. I’m a greeting card publisher. I’m not a scientist. I have Christmas cards that have to get shipped, and I fortunately have a fabulous staff at Great Arrow who takes care of my work when I’m out doing such stuff as taking a week off to read these comments. There were a million comments out there. Not a million, but quite a few thousand. And some of them were very flattering. Others were not so flattering, like every guy. You know, every chimpanzee with a 14-inch telescope is able to take these pictures. And it ended with an interview on The Today Show, which was a real thrill. I'll remember next time to bring a make-up artist, because the beautiful host of the show looked wonderful, and I looked like a pasty sight on the other side of the screen. But so I spent a week trying to get my brain around: What’s going on with this? Why is my picture going to 150 countries, and bringing 250,000 hits back to my website in a week? I really — there’s a lot of people who do this work. I'm not the only one. There are hundreds of fantastic astrophotographers doing work very much like this, and I really wanted to understand what was compelling about this image. I finally resided in this Wired interview with me and this DIY thing, which I have to say I didn’t know what DIY was. I had to look it up. But you all know what it is. It’s Do It Yourself. And maybe, it has something to do with the fact that images by an amateur, or a citizen astronomer are compelling, because they get you off your couch to do something. It makes you realize you can do it too. Whereas Hubble Space Telescope images that are so spectacular, they push you into the couch, in awe. You just want to sit and look. And I don’t know, if they make you stand up. So we all know the moral of this story, right? There’s no place like home. There is also no place like the backyard. The backyard is 15 feet from your back door, and that’s where discovery begins, because you can be there any day of he week, all the time. And that’s where I do my work. So this DIY thing — I hope it motivates you to get involved in science. Get involved in sharing your interest in discovery with other people, and discover stuff yourself. And when you discover stuff, do the other thing. Do "The Oh My God Thing" and share it. Because you never know when the person who’s in line to look at your scope: that young mom, or young kid who’s underneath, Donna's silver lamé blanket, is going to be the next Stephen Hawking. So that’s my story. When it’s a rainy day, I hope you go to Averted Imagination and see my work. Write me questions. I always answer them. When it stops raining, get out from under the trees and look up at the sky, because there’s amazing stuff there to see. And what we say in astronomy, to say goodbye is, "Clear skies." Thanks so much. I'm thrilled to be here. (Applause)