Review of the Year 2014

Wow, there goes another year.

Once again it has been a year of significant change for both me personally and for the blog too. A big personal change is that I now have little Denisa running about the place and this has led to the main change of the blog: that there is less of it. Time is now my single most precious resource and less of it is being allocated here and to photography. This is probably why more posts have a science feel and less of a photography feel, a transition that has been happening for a few years now in any case.

Nevertheless I will try to pick out my favourite photos from 2014 and shamelessly serve them up reheated in buffet format. In no special order, here are my favourites....

From January there is this picture of the Thames barrier. I took this the day after I got back from Romania after Christmas last year, the light was wonderful and using my ND grads really helped bring it out.

From my post on how to digitally achieve the Lomo effect there is this shot of some train tracks in the mountains of Romania.

Like millions of others this year I paid a visit to the poppies at the Tower of London, this was my best effort from there.

And from Ilfracombe in October there is this clifftop scene.

Not a bad little collection even if I do say so myself. My aim for the year ahead is to post more frequently, although there may not be many more photos. Luckily there's plenty of science out there to keep me busy. Happy new year one and all; keep it festive.

The View From St. Paul's

A few months ago my mother came to visit. She wanted to visit St. Paul's cathedral and climb to the summit, and so we went. On that occasion I just took a few snaps on my phone but I returned a few weeks later, awesome annual pass in hand, to try and get some decent clicks with my proper camera. Unfortunately the weather was against me. The photo above has been quite heavily processed to try and make the best of the sky; I've gotten quite lazy and you can see halos (no pun intended) around the buildings on the horizon. I also need to clean my lens and sensor. Below, I've deliberately gone for a silhouette type effect to mask the fact that otherwise it would be quite an underwhelming picture.

Still, I've learnt a lot about the location; I know what sort of shots I want to get, what time of day I need to be there to have the sun at the best angle and, like I said, I have an awesome annual pass and so I'm going to keep going back until the weather is in my favour. God willing.

The Sun: Part 3 - Helioseismology

Okay, I mean it this time. This time I'm definitely going to write a post about helioseismology; no distractions. This will be my third and final attempt; my first try ended up being a general overview of the sun and its structure, my second attempt wound up being about the potential of nuclear fusion here on Earth. But now, according to the Rule of Threes, I will finally keep my promise.

For the last couple of weeks I have been reading as much as I can about the now well established field of helioseismology and the first thing I had to learn was what it even is. In my innocence I thought that there might be quake type events happening in the sun but that turns out not to be the case. If you think about it for a while, though, you can see why this would be wrong. The Earth has many different components to it, the most relevant being the lithosphere which is made up of the tectonic plates of the surface and the top most part of the upper mantle. Here, where two continents meet, you might have one subducting under another or perhaps they will be grating against each other in opposite directions. In this situation it's possible that they might get a bit stuck and every now and then they will suddenly slip causing an earthquake. Asides from the damage we're all too used to seeing on the surface this will also cause sound waves to propagate through the Earth. These sound waves will move through different substances in different ways dependent upon their properties and so you can use this to study the internal structure of, in this case, the Earth. This is a key part of what seismology is here on the third rock but we can use the same principals with the sun; there, however, the waves aren't caused by solid rock but by shifting plasma densities.

Here you can see the ripples of a sunquake radiating out from its source. In just one hour the ripple travels a distance equivalent to 10 earth diameters.

Plasma, which is basically what the sun is, is a gas that has been stripped of electrons. The sun is not a boring, uniform, unchanging sphere of plasma but a highly active and dynamic one. It is hotter at its centre than it is nearer the surface and this can result in hotter, less dense plasma rising higher amongst cooler, less dense plasma. My best interpretation of what I've read, and I could easily be wrong, is that this causes a sound wave to be produced, perhaps through friction but don't quote me on that. Either way a sound wave is created. This wave then propagates and can be detected by instruments aboard the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) and the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), both satellites orbiting the sun. The waves tend to have frequencies of 1-5 microHertz, or around five minutes and amplitudes of hundreds of kilometres. Given this we can know at what sort of speed they should move and where there are deviations from this we can infer the density of the medium through which they're moving. This has given us a great level of detail about the internal structure of the sun.

Like all good theories though, it needs to be tested for accuracy and this has been done quite exquisitely. A few years ago scientists were able to detect these sound waves some 60,000km below the surface of the sun, they then predicted that this would result in the production of some sunspots at a given location. Two days later, sure enough, the sunspots appeared. You can see a video of it happening here:

This is super awesome. Not just because it represents an advance in our understanding of an obscure branch of solar science but because it has practical implications for us here on Earth. How so? Well, the magnetic field of the sun is particularly intense where sunspots are formed and at the end of the video, as the rotation of the sun begins to take the activity from view, you can see that vast arcs of plasma, greater than the size of the Earth itself, are formed along the lines of the magnetic field. The sunspots are at the bases of the arcs where they are anchored to the surface, but if they are strong enough then these arcs can snap free and hurl matter out into the solar system. Small events are referred to as solar flares and larger ones are called coronal mass ejections (CME). These can be highly significant as they can fling billions of tons of matter into space at a time. If the Earth happens to get in the way of this then you can expect a pretty impressive display by the aurorae at both poles as the matter interacts with our own magnetic field. Nothing wrong with that. If it is an especially large CME, though, then this could play havoc with electrical equipment all over the planet.

In late summer of 1859 the largest CME on record was observed. Known as the Carrington Event, it caused the aurorae to be seen as far south as the Caribbean and as far north as New Zealand. It also, however, caused widespread electrical damage. Telegraph stations across the globe went down, some operators were electrocuted, pylons sparked and some devices that were turned off began to operate. This was at a time when we were just at the beginning of the electrical age, if this happened to us today then it could be potentially devastating. It has been estimated that the cost to the United States alone would be in the region of 0.6-2.6 trillion dollars. That is a solar storm we do not want to happen, the problem is that, eventually, it will. Estimates say that there is a 12% chance that there will be another by the year 2022 and that it is all but guaranteed by the end of the century. So it's not a matter of if but when.

Here is where the research comes in. That CME took just 17 hours to reach us from the sun. That is not much time to enact emergency procedures to protect our electrical systems, not that we actually have any such procedures as of yet. With this research though it would be possible to have at least a couple of days notice which should be plenty of time to prepare the world saving weeks of disruption and trillions of dollars - just as soon as we know how to prepare.

Perhaps the most important message to take home from this is that you never know where the benefits of scientific research might lead. There are certain groups of people cough politicians cough cough who want scientists to solve certain specific problems and will only fund research aimed at doing so. Sometimes this can work, but sometimes it won't, and what should never be discounted is good old fashioned, curiosity driven, blue sky research where you fund a scientist simply to figure something out because it's interesting. This has led to many of the most significant breakthroughs in human history, perhaps most notably in the creation of the internet. In this case a bunch of guys sat around staring at the sun, so to speak, quietly developing our notion of space weather and now we have a way of potentially saving our society as we know it. This is just one of the reasons I love science.

The Orton Effect

In the 1980s a man by the name of Michael Orton wrote an article on photography. In it he presented images of a kind that no one had ever seen the like of before. Today, these types of images are a mainstay of any photographer who wants to give a painterly or ethereal look to their photos; the technique has become known as the Orton Effect and below you can see an example of one of my pictures that has been given the Michael Orton treatment.

Back then he was doing this using film and, frankly, I have no idea how you would go about doing that because I have never worked with film. I can say that it is very easy to create digitally. I won't give a detailed step by step guide here but basically the steps are these: take your original image, slightly overexpose it, duplicate it, apply a Gaussian blur to the duplicate and then overlay the sharp image with the blurred one. It won't work for every picture, some work better than others and I haven't figured out yet what the formula for a good result is. I tried a few that didn't really do anything for me before I got to this one; which happens to be of possibly my favourite photo I have ever taken.

The Orton Effect, then, is a strange one; it seems to increase and decrease the level of detail all at the same time. It is difficult to describe what it does to an image but people tend to use words like romantic and emotional when trying to do so. My preference is painterly.