September 20, 2017

Treknology looks at Star Trek gizmos

Star Trek first hit the airwaves over a half century ago, and Dr. Ethan Siegel finds it amazing how many of the gizmos, gadgets, and technologies imagined by the various Trek television series have become reality. Siegel, theoretical astrophysicist and science writer, is author of the new book Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive (Voyageur Press, 2017). Treknology is scheduled for release on October 15 and is available for pre-order on Amazon now.

Siegel, a Trek fan since discovering The Next Generation (TNG) as a kid, figures he was just the guy to dig into Star Trek’s technology.

“That intersection of an interest in Star Trek and Sci-fi, of an interest in what it means for humanity, and a knowledge of physics, all of those have come together to make this book possible,” Siegel said.

Treknology devotes a separate chapter to 28 different technologies that were used in the various series.

“These technologies that were so futuristic that they were imagined centuries in the future, some of them don’t appear to be that far off,” Siegel noted. “Some of them are already here and in widespread use. Others that we thought just a few years ago were going to be far-future technologies look like they’re coming to fruition.”

We’ve got that Treknology already

Siegel noted that it was The Original Series (TOS) that came up with the automatic sliding door, now a staple in every airport and supermarket. Your tablet is also cooler than anything Trek came up with.

“What you’ve got in your smart phone is much more impressive that anything that were on those touch-screen pads that Star Trek envisioned,” Siegel said. “Here we are with something that’s smaller, that’s more compact.”

That goes for pretty much all of the computers, he noted.

“We’ve gone way beyond what Star Trek would have envisioned much more quickly than anything that came about in the original series,” Siegel said. At the time of TOS in real life we had room-sized computers that had less computing oomph than today’s pocket calculators. When TNG came around, they figured they had to jazz up the computing and came up with something new and fancy—digital storage.

“Your flash drive is more powerful than a Star Trek isolinear chip,” Siegel noted. “As far as computation goes—ships computer, pads, isolinear chips—we’ve blown away what Star Trek would have envisioned.”

Medical technology


Dr. Ethan Siegel, author of Treknology,
during a lecture in Portland last year.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.
As an astronomy and physics guy, Siegel said he was especially interested in learning about the medical technologies and biological situations that Star Trek dreamed up. He noted that we may soon be able to use synthehol, a substance with the positive effects of booze without the negative impacts.

“Synthehol is on track pharmacologically to become real,” Siegel said.

We may also be close to helping sightless people see, ala Geordi La Forge—the TNG character played by LeVar Burton—who wore a special visor that allowed him to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

“If we can make an implant somewhere in your brain’s visual cortex, and we can wirelessly feed an external signal to that implant,” Siegel said, “this is a potential way to restore sight to the blind,” even if they have no eyes or optic nerves at all. NASA actually tinkered with sight-improving technology in the late 1990s, and called its project JORDY: Joint Optical Reflective DisplaY.

Not there yet

There are other Treknologies that aren’t so close yet. Warp drive is at the top of that list. He says it’s mathematically possible, but it will be tough to make it work in our universe.

“It depends on if you can either have negative gravitational mass or negative energy,” Siegel explained. “If you can, then great, we can build warp drive. If that’s a physical impossibility—and we haven’t discovered anything like that yet—then I don’t know how warp drive can be possible.”

“This is probably one of the most difficult technologies to achieve, but I still don’t want to rule it out and say it’s impossible,” he added. “I want to look at what it would take to make it possible.”

A few other technologies such as subspace communication and transporters would require “extensions” to our current physics to become reality, Siegel said, and we’re a ways from life-like androids and holodecks, too.

Siegel has written widely. His first book was Beyond the Galaxy: How Humanity Looked Beyond Our Milky Way and Discovered the Entire Universe (World Scientific Publishing Co., 2015). He writes the Starts With a Bang blog on Forbes, and produces a podcast of the same name. Siegel can be found under that handle on Twitter and Facebook. He expects to be touring conventions and bookstores around the country in support of Treknology. We look forward to the book’s release next month.

September 13, 2017

Planning for the 2024 total solar eclipse

Last month’s total solar eclipse was the first one I had ever seen. Like many newly minted and experienced umbraphiles alike, I’m already thinking about the next total solar eclipse to cross the United States, which will happen on April 8, 2024. It seems like a long time off, but you don’t want to be like those folks who were frantically looking for eclipse glasses the day before the event!

As I ponder the last two years of planning for 2017, I realize that the advice received in the course of the enterprise was somewhat contradictory. In summary, when preparing for a total solar eclipse, one should plan carefully and well in advance, always have a plan B, and be ready to chuck it all and just wing it in the case of bad weather or other opportunities and circumstances.

Plan ahead

Fred Espenak
Photo: Greg Scheiderer
Our first tutorial in eclipse planning came from Mr. Eclipse himself, Fred Espenak, who spoke at the Seattle Astronomical Society banquet in January 2016. (Here’s our recap of that talk.) Espenak and his weather guru partner, Jay Anderson of Eclipsophile, scouted the entire path of totality for viewing and weather conditions. It was Espenak’s declaration of Madras, Oregon as having the best clear-sky prospects for eclipse day that drove thousands of people to central Oregon. My favorite remark from Espenak from that talk: “On eclipse day you don’t get climate, you get weather.”

Oregon had the best odds, many of us rolled the dice on that and came out winners.


Have a plan B

For many eclipse chasers plan B amounts to watching the weather forecast in the days and weeks leading up to the eclipse and, if things look dicey, going somewhere else. Many choose their preferred viewing site based on the ability to get away. That’s one reason that Espenak viewed last month’s eclipse from Casper, Wyoming: the weather prospects there were good, and major highways running east and west along the path of totality meant a good chance to run to find a break in any clouds that might move in. The Astronomical League held its annual convention there, too.

Seattle Astronomy’s Greg Scheiderer with Stephen O’Meara at
the Seattle Astronomical Society meeting Aug. 16, 2017.
The week before the eclipse Steven O’Meara, a columnist for Astronomy magazine and an avid eclipse chaser, gave a talk to the Seattle Astronomical Society. He recounted how, as a young child, his mother showed him little eclipses reflected through the holes in their home’s window blinds.

“Partial eclipses have been dear to me ever since I was a child,” O’Meara said. He noted that a thought struck him after a recent similar presentation.

“I realized how wonderful partial eclipses are and how much more fun I have at partial eclipses, because there’s no pressure,” O’Meara said. We think he actually thrives on the pressure though, and he told a number of entertaining stories about last-ditch efforts to beat the clouds and catch at least a glimpse of an elusive eclipse. Some of the more interesting ones involved Pop Tarts and essentially hijacking a boat in Indonesia when it appeared there would be no eclipse viewing on land. He may well be the king of plan B.

My own plan

Writing the Seattle Astronomy blog and producing our podcast was my research and planning for last month’s eclipse. I’ve done 27 posts (including this one) and did 15 podcasts about the eclipse, with the subject of many being the question of why one would choose Stapleton, Nebraska or Nashville for eclipse watching over the other places in the path of totality. I learned a lot about the activities each community had planned, and what else there was to do there once an eclipse was over. With all of that information, I ended up picking Salem, Oregon. I had three reasons: proximity, population, and weather.

Data by NASA/GSFC. Graph courtesy
Jay Anderson, Eclipsophile.com
Proximity. I reasoned that, if I lived in the Salem area, I probably would not have gone anywhere else. I’d have gone to a local park, or sat in my own back yard, to watch the eclipse. One short move may have been to get a little closer to the center line. With Salem just a four-hour drive from Seattle, this seemed a sensible option.

Population. At some point in my deliberations, I decided that I preferred a more urban setting to a rural one. It seemed that accommodations, the ability to get around, and access to stuff like food and a porta-potty might be more likely in a setting with more infrastructure.

Weather. Yes, many people would and did laugh about this. Walk up to anyone and tell them that you plan to watch a solar eclipse in western Oregon, and about 80 percent of them will immediately laugh and declare that, “It will rain.”

Looking at Anderson’s chart above of weather along the path of totality revealed a different story, however. While, statistically, the weather in Salem on August 21 of any year isn’t as good as that in Madras, it’s still pretty close, and a far sight better than just about any place east of Missouri. Salem seemed a good bet. When the date arrived and climate turned into weather, it helped that we were in the middle of the driest, clearest summer anyone can remember.

Chuck it

As I asked people along the path if accommodations were available in their town or city, most of them noted that hotels don’t even book for more than a year in advance. In fact, I heard several funny stories about innkeepers befuddled by someone wanting to book a room five years ahead of time! Naturally, when I went online to look for reservations in Salem 13 months prior to the eclipse, everything was completely sold out. Some time later I stumbled across an available motel room in Lebanon, Oregon and snapped up the reservation. I got tickets to OMSI’s eclipse event at the fairgrounds in Salem, and I was ready to go.

Back in December I published a post and podcast interviewing Elaine Cuyler of Orbit Oregon, publisher of the kids’ book The Big Eclipse. Cuyler, a former marketing director for Eola Hills Winery near Salem, was putting together the Wine Country Eclipse festival at the Polk County Fairgrounds. She invited me to speak at the festival, complete with gratis lodging in a residence hall at nearby Western Oregon University in Monmouth. It seemed like a no-brainer, and I jumped at the chance. I cancelled my motel reservation and gladly stayed in the dorms at WOU (pronounced “woo”, according to the staff.)

So, after about 20 months of planning, I ended up doing something that was only finalized about two or three weeks ahead of the eclipse. As noted in my post about eclipse weekend, it couldn’t have worked out better.

Total solar eclipse, 2024

Map courtesy Michael Zeiler, GreatAmericanEclipse.com
If this year’s was “The Great American Eclipse,” then some are already dubbing the 2024 event “The Great North American Eclipse.” As you can see from the map at left, this one will first hit land in Mexico, swoop up through Texas, cross the path of the 2017 eclipse in Carbondale, Illinois, and zip northeast until it crosses Maine and the maritime provinces of Canada. Thanks to Micheal Zeiler of GreatAmericanEclipse.com for the map; Zeiler was one of our interview subjects, too!

So, where will you be in April 2024? I’ve been looking at Jay Anderson’s weather maps already, and it seems the best weather prospects will be in Mexico, but I’m leaning toward Texas right now. I’d try to make hotel reservations, but nobody books more than a year in advance. And some cool opportunity might turn up at the last minute.

September 4, 2017

Learning about exoplanets with AoT Seattle

Often when an exoplanet is discovered the first question asked by the mainstream media is whether the new planet is “Earth-like.” In truth we know little about these far-away planets other than their mass or size, and whether they orbit within the habitable zone of their host star. Scientists are using PCA and SAMURAI to learn more about exoplanets, and LUVOIR may ultimately help us get a much better look at these distant worlds.

Lupita Tovar spoke about mapping
exoplanets at Astronomy on Tap
Seattle August 23, 2017.
(Photo: Greg Scheiderer)
Lupita Tovar is a first-year Ph.D. student in astronomy and astrobiology at the University of Washington, where she works at the Virtual Planetary Laboratory. She gave a talk titled “Mapping New Worlds” at the most recent Astronomy on Tap Seattle event at Peddler Brewing Company in Ballard. Tovar is helping develop the parameters for LUVOIR, which stands for Large UltraViolet/Optical/InfraRed Surveyor. It is one of four projects being considered by NASA as part of the 2020 decadal survey, which will help pick the agency’s next big project.

Big is the operative word for LUVOIR. Astronomers love aperture for their telescopes, and LUVOIR would dwarf any space telescope to date. The Hubble Space Telescope has a 2.4-meter mirror, and the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch next year, will be 6.5 meters. LUVOIR would nearly double that; Tovar said it is proposed right now to have a 12-meter mirror. It would also be equipped with a coronagraph which would block the light of a host star. Much as Venus and Mars were visible in the daytime during last month’s total solar eclipse, blocking starlight would allow us to see much dimmer objects nearby.

“The coronagraph will allow us to see those close-in planets, like Venus, and allow us to study those planets,” Tovar said. LUVOIR would be a powerful instrument. It could see Venus, Earth, and Jupiter from a distance of ten parsecs, or about 33 light years.

Fortunately, astronomers don’t have to wait for LUVOIR to make progress on mapping exoplanets. Tovar said that today they’re using PCA—Principal Component Analysis—to get a better idea about an exoplanet’s surface.

“We use PCA to extract how many components are there,” Tovar explained. “Is it just one, solid icy body? Are there two different types of surfaces sitting on that planet? Are there three? Are there more? PCA allows us to extract that information.”

Call in the SAMURAI

Once they know how many surface types there are, astronomers can then use SAMURAI—Surface Albedo Mapping Using RotAtional Inversion—to figure out just what those surfaces are. Tovar said it’s like looking at a beach ball as it is batted around. As the ball spins, different colors face the observer. SAMURAI uses algorithms to determine the composition of each surface type. For example, land reflects more light than ocean does, but an ocean’s reflection will spike when it’s near the edge of the exoplanet, from our view, because of the glint of light from the host star.

LUVOIR is just a glint in the eyes of astronomers now, but it along with PCA and SAMURAI could give us a much better idea about the makeup of exoplanets.

“Combined together, all of these three components will help you create a map,” Tovar said.

Is Tatooine out there?

Star Wars fans often speculate about the existence of planets like Luke Skywalker’s home world Tatooine, which has two suns. So far we know of a dozen exoplanets in orbit around binary star systems. Diana Windemuth, also a Ph.D. student in astronomy and astrobiology at UW, studies these sorts of systems and gave a talk titled, “By the Light of Two Suns” at Astronomy on Tap Seattle.

Diana Windemuth discussed exoplanets
orbiting binary star systems at AoT
Seattle. (Photo: Greg Scheiderer)
“Our Sun is a bit of a weirdo in that it does not have a companion,” Windemuth said, explaining that about half of stars like the Sun have one. The more massive a primary star is, the more likely it is to have a companion, she said. Further, there are two types of stable orbits a planet in a binary star system can have. In an S-type orbit the planet will go around just one of the stars; it will be either a circumprimary or circumsecondary orbit. In the P-type, the exoplanet orbits both stars.

“A circumbinary planet goes around in a wider orbit around an inner, closer-in binary,” Windemuth explained. She said it is harder to find these sorts of systems using Kepler’s transit method because throwing in a third body complicates things. Kepler measures the overall light from a system, and the amount of light we see changes not only when the planet transits, but when the stars eclipse each other.

“These are called eclipsing binaries because they go around one another,” Windemuth said. Exoplanets are confirmed when dips in the light during transits happen at regular intervals. Usually a computer picks that out of the data, but it doesn’t work so well on binary systems.

It’s a trick!

“It turns out its difficult to train a computer to do that because of what we call the geometric effect,” Windemuth said. Because the stars move with respect to each other in binary systems, the period of transits can appear to vary because of differing distances the light travels to reach us. Gravitational interactions in the system can also create wobble and change the perceived period of transits.

“Even though the period of your planet might be the same, the transits will occur at different times,” Windemuth noted.

It’s probably because of these challenges that we’ve only discovered a handful of circumbinary planets so far, Windemuth said, and none of them are candidates to be the real-life Tatooine.

“No terrestrial circumbinary planets have been found yet,” she said. That could be because they’re too hard to find, or maybe planets with short periods are destroyed when they orbit too close to the binary stars.

“It’s probably because our detection algorithms are not good enough yet,” Windemuth concluded.

September 1, 2017

Dreamy musical astronomy show Starball plays Seattle

A dreamy, musical astronomy show will return to its birth town of Seattle next week after more than a decade away. Starball, created by John Kauffman and Dan Dennis, will play at West of Lenin in Fremont from September 7–11.

According to the show’s Facebook page, “Audience members play villagers in a dystopian future in which the global government, or World Regime, has ended the relationship between humanity and the stars. But two Astronomasons, the Conductor (Kaufmann) and the Proxy (Dennis), have rebelled, calling the villagers to a secret clearing for a creative ritual.”

It sounds a little dark, but director Rachel Katz Carey and producer A.J. Epstein call it “giddy fun.”

Carey said Kauffman and Dennis were the perfect people to create this show.

“They’ve got charm and charisma for days and they’ve got improv experience and they’ve got huge, open hearts, so people just want to jump in and work with them,” Carey said. “They also have the hard science. They’re not just theater guys who thought they found a gimmick; they really, truly know their astronomy.”

Both were working at the Willard Smith Planetarium at the Pacific Science Center when they created and first performed Starball in 2002. In 2004 they brought in Carey and Epstein to help take the show to new places.

“What they needed was scaffolding to give some form and structure,” Carey said. “It’s been my experience that improv thrives the best when there is a scaffolding and structure to support it.”

In the intervening years Starball has been performed in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and even Spain. For its return to Seattle it will be performed in an inflatable planetarium on the West of Lenin stage.

Epstein explained that as audience members enter they will be asked to anonymously jot down notes about a recent dream. During the performance dreams will be drawn at random, and the actors and audience will look for parts of the dream in the stars projected on the planetarium dome. The audience and actors together will create stories based on the dreams identified in the sky.

L-R: Seattle Astronomy’s Greg Scheiderer, Starball producer AJ
Epstein and director Rachel Katz Carey in front of the inflatable
 planetarium in which Starball will be performed Sept. 7-11
at West of Lenin. (Photo: Greg Scheiderer)
“By the end of the night we have an entirely new sky mythology, not just individual constellations but a mythology unique to that group of people,” Epstein said. “And then they write a song.”

“An original song for every show based on what’s shown up in the sky,” Carey added.

“A Jungian devotee would have a field day with this show,” Epstein laughed.

He laments that, as a culture, we’ve lost our connection to the night sky.

“Most of us now live in cities where we can maybe see a couple of stars,” he said, “so the show really is very loudly but very elegantly getting people to actually look up at the sky and make a connection.”

At Seattle Astronomy we like to explore the intersections of art and science. Some would set up a divide there, but neither Carey nor Epstein see it.

“That’s sort of a Mac/PC religion question!” Epstein laughed.

“The stars were art before they were science,” Carey said. “We’ve been telling stories about stars long before we had telescopes.”

“The best scientists and the best writers about science that I know absolutely have the connection to art and imagination,” Carey added. “How do you get the big discoveries if you can’t imagine ahead of your data and then do the work to see if it’s there?”

Both admit to bias because of their involvement, but insist that Starball is way different than any planetarium show you’ve ever seen.

“You just have to be there, and when you leave you’re different because you’ve figured some stuff out,” Carey said.

“This one really grabs an audience by the heart and brings them to a place where they get it,” Epstein added.

Starball runs at West of Lenin for seven performances September 7-11. Tickets are $20 and are available online. Early purchase is recommended because the planetarium will only seat around 40 people.