Oregano Leaves, © Harold Davis Congratulations to Harold Davis!

Harold Davis (no relation to previous winner Randy Davis :-> ) will be collaborating with KQED staff on our next 2-minute YPOQ segment for broadcast and web distribution. It will air and premiere online on Tuesday July 21st, 2009.

His winning set, Miracle Worlds of Nature , did a wonderful job of expressing a sense of scope and color, with a passion for nature, via a process that captures something unexpected and essential.

More in his own own words:

"The miracles of nature happen in our world at large and in small worlds no bigger than a water drop. The subjects for these photos are in my garden. I look for magnificent worlds of nature that may be, in fact, tiny. With many of these images I have also used studio photography, scanning, and alternative digital image processing to enhance my creative sense of entering an alternative and miraculous world of nature."

We will be doing yet more YPOQ calls in 2009, as well as blogging about great submissions on the Quest web site.

Would you your photography like to be considered for a future YPOQ episode on QUEST? Sign up for our email newsletter to get an announcement for the next submission call, or head on over to our Flickr photo group for KQED QUEST and read the Rules for Submission.

For inspiration, please see our previous YPOQ winner videos:

• Russ Morris
• Erin Malone
• Cris Benton
• John Albers-Mead
• Laura Watt
• Randy Davis

Cycling and photography are two passions of mine that I ardently pursue in my free time, so it was only natural that I felt an immediate kinship with Your Photo on QUEST's featured photographer Randy Davis. Randy explores remote locales in the Bay Area on his mountain bike, which allows him to access places that are tougher to reach by car or on foot. He's often accompanied by his dog Lucky, a Saluki mix whom he rescued from the streets; this requires some skillful maneuvering at times as he has to manage Lucky's leash and his heavy camera gear. We conducted our interview and took photos in the Castle Rock Recreation Area of Mt. Diablo State Park, with the help of fellow cycling enthusiast and sound person Bill Stefanacci. We wished that all of our work days could be outdoors in the sunshine and on the bike!

Randy has donated prints to Save Mount Diablo, an organization dedicated to preserving the land. They're also partners with the Mountain Diablo Interpretive Association, a "non-profit volunteer organization which assists the California Department of Parks and Recreation in maintaining and interpreting Mt. Diablo State Park for its 700,000 visitors each year."

Randy's currently working on a new series focusing on the bald eagles in the Bay Area. You can also see more of his work on his website.

'Candy Tuft' by Hannah Polleck, Age 11I am always amazed at the pace of technology and curious how the next generation relates to the ever-increasing pace. I am a gadget girl – CNET is one of my favorite websites and I get a kick out of reading all the reviews and comparing before I settle on buying something. However, I can remember, albeit vaguely, life without internet or cell phones. This is giving away my age but in my 20's I lived in England and cell phones and texting broke there before coming to the states. I remember the plethora of people on cell phones being so foreign to me. It was if this was a new species, communicating in a technological way. That and I thought one out of five people were crazy because they were talking to themselves, or they seemed to be, while briskly walking towards Oxford Circus.

For the next generation, cell phones, computers, and digital cameras are something they have always known. While I had to get to know how to use the technology as it was developed, they have been introduced to it already molded and they are incredibly comfortable using it. This became readily clear to me coordinating the California in Your Backyard Youth Photo Contest. The creators of this contest and subsequent exhibit designers decided to only take digital entries. Thus only digital cameras were used and it was less of a deterrent that I surmised. We were even able to get a donation of digital cameras to a classroom of students in the area. Not only are permanent digital cameras readily accessible, now disposable cameras come with the option for digital images rather than film. For the class, we were able to get children-friendly digital cameras they could re-use.

The work of all those who entered the contest was impressive. The judges were blown away by the level of detail and sharpness of the pictures. Some entries rivaled the quality of professionals shooting with film. Half of the equation of this high quality was of course the digital medium but I believe the other part children's innate ability to immerse themselves in a state of wonder and curiosity. Images were up close and imaginative. There was a great sense of play in the 150 submissions that were received.

Only twenty-five of the images were chosen to be displayed in the Children's Gallery of California Academy of Sciences. Winners were announced on August 1^st, 2008 and they received cash prizes as an award. However, the judges were so impressed by the level of work, the decision was made that all the submissions should have a chance to be displayed. So through the grace of technology, an online gallery was created, housing all the work submitted in the contest. You can browse through the images at www.calacademy.org/gallery.

Working on this project has given me a new sense of wonder about technology. As the museum is being built, multi-media and technology is being incorporated into the space to better relate relevant material to the public. It is an ever-changing medium but one that can bring up to the minute data. I am very curious how the next generation will take this information and technology and run with it and what they will create for future generations.

Making Every Photon Count

Last week I went to a talk given by the leader of the Supernova Factory collaboration at LBNL. What is SN factory? This is an ambitious project to study supernovae like never before. I mentioned this project briefly in a previous post , now that they are so close to releasing their results I want to discuss it a bit more.

The main idea of this project is to study several hundred nearby supernovae using an instrument known as the Supernova Integral Field Spectrograph, or SNIFS. This type of instrument is essentially a blend between a traditional imaging camera and a spectrograph.

The resolution in an integral field spectrograph is defined in spaxels instead of the pixels that have become all too familiar with the advent of digital cameras. A spaxel is quite similar to a pixel, there aren't nearly as many and each one carries at least a 1000 times as much information.

In your digital camera, the light passes through the lens and directly onto the CCD. Each pixel on the CCD counts the number of photons in the red, the blue, and the green. Typically, there are millions of pixels, each counting photons from a slightly different region of the subject of your photograph.

Now imagine that instead of just counting red, green, and blue, that each pixel counts the entire rainbow of light from your subject. Now you have a spaxel. In an intregral field unit, the light passes through an array of microlenses and prisms before landing on the detector. We would call each set of microlenses and prisms a spaxel. The resulting image carries information about every wavelength of light from every region of your target.

Spectrum of the first SN observed with SNIFSThe advantage to an integral field spectrograph like SNIFS is that you gain a lot more information than either an imager or spectrograph alone. With an integral field spectrograph you can basically identify and organize every photon that reaches the telescope.

Specifically designed to observe supernovae, SNIFS is being operated at the 88-inch telescope on Mauna Kea. Spaxels are quite expensive – this particular instrument has only 225. However, this is more than enough to observe the entirety of a galaxy, a supernova, and the background.

The members of the SN Factory have now observed over 100 SNe using this new camera. Last Thursday, I saw the data from the first 25 well-calibrated supernovae and was very impressed. The data showed the evolution of each supernova and the properties of the host galaxy in great detail. I'm sure the supernova community will be equally impressed when they first see these new results.

Kyle S. Dawson is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and development of a proposed space-based telescope at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Star or Comet?Yesterday was a very long day at work. I was stuck in meetings with our collaborators for over 6 hours! To make it worse, we spent the entire time discussing a single topic. I even wrote my last paper on it. What could possibly be so captivating, you ask?

Remember the solar wind I wrote about a few weeks ago? This stream of protons does more than create comet tails and aurora, it also destroys all of those fancy electronics we work so hard to put into orbit.

The protons streaming from the sun carry a lot of energy, and they leave a lot of this energy behind as they pass through satellites and astronauts that don’t have the Earth’s atmosphere to protect them. The energy released wrecks havoc on the system, throwing electrons and atoms around like a game of ping-pong. This is one form of radiation damage.

Definitely a comet!
This radiation damage is harmless over short periods of time, much like an occasional X-ray at the dentist. However the solar wind becomes a problem for something like the Hubble Space Telescope or our proposed satellite SNAP which are exposed for many years.

To understand how a telescope degrades from exposure to radiation, let me give an extremely quick explanation of how we gather astronomical images. A telescope is very similar to a camera you buy in the store. The large mirror is equivalent to the lens on your camera. The part that suffers the most radiation damage is the Charge Coupled Device, also known as a CCD.

The CCD is essentially the same as the 8-megapixel chip in your digital camera. This serves as an electronic version of film, recording the image through the photoelectric effect rather than through a chemical reaction. If you can still remember how photography was in the days of film, I'm sure you can appreciate the relief of going digital. Astronomers realized this early on and were pioneers in the use of CCDs.

The photons from the subject of the photograph collide with electrons in the silicon of a CCD, knocking them free from their parent atom. The free electrons are then collected in a well near the site of the collision. Once the exposure is complete, charge is moved one well (or pixel) at a time toward a transistor which then reports the number of electrons found. This process is usually described through the analogy of a bucket brigade passing buckets of water from a reservoir to a fire.

When the CCD is brand new, the bucket brigade performs almost perfectly. If I want to observe a star, the image comes out crystal clear. However, after enough time in space and in the solar wind, the CCD begins to show its wear. The bucket brigade gets sloppy at work and has to contend with an increasingly difficult obstacle course, spilling a little bit of water (or electrons) during each transfer. That same star now leaves a trail of charge behind and begins to look more like a comet.

Now, if I am observing a star, I want my image to look like a star, not like a comet. Is that really too much to ask? Unfortunately, the CCD will inevitably deteriorate in space and astronomers have to find ways to predict and correct for this deterioration. This is what we spent yesterday discussing. We passed around some pretty good ideas but still have a bit of work to do before we can prove a new method for correcting the images. I just hope we it figured out before our satellite launches in 2015!

Kyle S. Dawson is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and development of a proposed space-based telescope at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

latitude: 37.8768, longitude: -122.251