How the Sun Paints the Sky: a webinar video
Unless they are astronauts, humans must view the Universe through the window of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Although a clear sky is relatively transparent to visible light, bright astronomical objects — most noticeably the Sun — can paint the entire sky with luminosity, colour and shadow to be captured by both landscape painters and photographers.
How does this happen and what physical processes are responsible for these beautiful colours, gradations and patterns?
The talk explains some of this and is illustrated with spectacular images of the sky from space and from above the European observatories in the Chilean Atacama desert.
It concludes with some remarks about how we will characterise the atmospheres of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.
A text version of the talk can be downloaded at:
herschelsociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/How-the...
A video of the webinar given to the Herschel Society can be found at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9v9pFluF-M
and one to the Daylight Academy at:
daylight.academy/news/virtual-talk-on-the-colour-of-sky-r...
Robert (Bob) Fosbury is currently an emeritus astronomer at the European Southern Observatory and an honorary professor at the Institute of Ophthalmology at UCL. He worked for 26 years at the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of ESA‘s collaboration with NASA on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) project based at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) near Munich in Germany.
Fosbury joined this initiative in 1985, more than 5 years before launch. During the latter part of this period, Bob served on NASA‘s Ad Hoc Science Working Group and ESA‘s Study Science Team as they developed the instrument concepts for the James Webb Space Telescope, the next-generation space observatory.
He has worked on topics including solar-type stars, the environments of black holes in quasars and active galaxies, the nature of galaxies in the early Universe and, most recently, on ways of characterising the atmospheres of earth-like exoplanets.
In retirement, he has turned to studies of animal, including human, vision by working with visual neuroscientist on the effects environmental light on animal systems.
How the Sun Paints the Sky: a webinar video
Unless they are astronauts, humans must view the Universe through the window of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Although a clear sky is relatively transparent to visible light, bright astronomical objects — most noticeably the Sun — can paint the entire sky with luminosity, colour and shadow to be captured by both landscape painters and photographers.
How does this happen and what physical processes are responsible for these beautiful colours, gradations and patterns?
The talk explains some of this and is illustrated with spectacular images of the sky from space and from above the European observatories in the Chilean Atacama desert.
It concludes with some remarks about how we will characterise the atmospheres of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.
A text version of the talk can be downloaded at:
herschelsociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/How-the...
A video of the webinar given to the Herschel Society can be found at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9v9pFluF-M
and one to the Daylight Academy at:
daylight.academy/news/virtual-talk-on-the-colour-of-sky-r...
Robert (Bob) Fosbury is currently an emeritus astronomer at the European Southern Observatory and an honorary professor at the Institute of Ophthalmology at UCL. He worked for 26 years at the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of ESA‘s collaboration with NASA on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) project based at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) near Munich in Germany.
Fosbury joined this initiative in 1985, more than 5 years before launch. During the latter part of this period, Bob served on NASA‘s Ad Hoc Science Working Group and ESA‘s Study Science Team as they developed the instrument concepts for the James Webb Space Telescope, the next-generation space observatory.
He has worked on topics including solar-type stars, the environments of black holes in quasars and active galaxies, the nature of galaxies in the early Universe and, most recently, on ways of characterising the atmospheres of earth-like exoplanets.
In retirement, he has turned to studies of animal, including human, vision by working with visual neuroscientist on the effects environmental light on animal systems.