Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - What’s Holding Back Your View of the Stars? Common Eye Deficiencies Explained

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered if your eyes were enough to capture all it has to offer? Spoiler alert: They’re not! While our eyes are absolutely amazing, they are also full of flaws. Nearsightedness, astigmatism, and even pesky floaters! But did you know these same flaws are mirrored in the world’s most advanced telescopes? In this episode, I discuss common eye deficiencies and explain how they affect our ability to observe the stars. I compare them to the optical imperfections in telescopes, such as chromatic and spherical aberration.  Tune in to learn more about nature’s first telescopes!  This episode is part 2 of a series where we’ll uncover even more intriguing insights about the connections between our eyes and telescopes, so stay tuned! Check out part 1: https://youtu.be/lSbyohV1XSE Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro  01:29 Deficiencies of the human eye 05:42 Deficiencies in telescopes  13:59 Conclusion  15:37 Outro Additional resources:  ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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who speaks often about the eye and the effects of sunlight on the human eye. It's supposed to go on his podcast at some point. We'll see when that is. And when I do, I want to talk to him about the similarities. between the human eye and a telescope. And how understanding the limitations of each allows us to use both in a better, more optimal fashion. As Andrew likes to say, we like to provide these

at zero cost to consumer. And today's video will talk about the deficiencies. Previously, part one will have a link to it up above. We discussed the magnificence of the human eye and how it does what it does and the similarities between the human eye and a telescope. We're all born with two refracting telescopes, as I said. We talked in part one about how you can improve

your telescopic vision and even what supplements you might be able to take to improve your night vision, astronomical techniques including averted vision, using your peripheral vision. Understanding the limitations of the human eye allows you to use it in a much better fashion. And that's what today is about. A reminder, you can get my free telescope buyer's guide down below when you join my Monday Magic mailing list at briankeating.com slash telescope. So let's dive back in into the eyeball, this time with an eye towards its deficiencies. It's lacunae, my favorite word. Several different factors can degrade your ability to do astronomy using the human eye.

The most common is something like near-sightedness or far-sightedness or astigmatism. These different optical effects can give you different challenges when observing things through a telescope, or even with a naked eye, not using a telescope. So we'll cover several different types of eye deficiencies now and how you can rectify them. Some are easy, some are impossible to rectify, unfortunately. Let's start off with far-sightedness, otherwise known as hyperopia. Hyperopia or far-sightedness is a condition that makes it difficult to focus on nearby objects. But distant objects, including stars and planets, they remain sharp.

It's easily corrected with contact lenses or glasses. Myopia, our near-sightedness, causes objects to blur. But it can also give you an edge in observing fine details like craters on the moon. You can use corrective lenses to assist with this, and you can also use something called LASIC, which was pioneered by past guest Donna Strickland in It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless.

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over a ramping on frequency range, as we discussed in this interview with Donna Strickland, and she'll be featured in my second edition of interviews with Nobel Laureates coming in early 2025. Just before Andrew Huberman's Protocols book comes out, I've got to beat him before he takes up all the science, oxygen. Now, for stargazers, LASIC can provide clear, unaided vision. but some may experience side effects like halos and glow around bright objects, especially at night. And I'm a poster child for that. I got LASIC in 1997, and I only got it in one eye, my right eye, or what I used to call my bionic eye. And ever since then, it's been suffering from many conditions like dry eye, and I do see halos around objects. It doesn't really bother me that much. And it is certainly better

than having to wear glasses, although I'm now in my 50s, so I do need to get corrective lenses on occasion to read stuff off the teleprompter. Stop reading nap. Just kidding. And lastly, as I mentioned, there are two other factors that can degrade the human eyes' ability to capture starlight, a stigmatism which is causing stars to appear stretched. And this is due to irregularly shaped corneas. Glasses can help with this, as can lace it. And lastly, two other effects that do lead to degraded vision and sometimes can affect

your night vision are floaters and colorblindness. They have less of an effect than you might think, especially colorblindness, because reducing the ability to see the night's colors is actually not necessary for enjoying almost any site through a telescope, unless you look through the giant Magellan telescope, which I'll show pictures of my visit to the construction site in 2019, this enormous altar of science. I could see through a six-meter diameter telescope, four times the collecting area of the Hubble telescope, I could actually see colors in astronomical objects with the naked eye alone. But usually, I would say always, unless you have access to the giant Magellan telescope or a similar

telescope with enormous aperture, you're never going to perceive colors with ordinary eyesight alone. So color blindness doesn't really hurt you. Floaters, on the other hand, can affect you. I have them in one of my eyes. And they're typically most pernicious when you're looking at bright objects, which is not really going to be the case unless you look at the moon or the sun through your remaining good eye. But remember, never look at the sun. That will cause permanent blindness through a telescope, unless you have a solar filter or similar device to prevent the overwhelming brightness of the sun's intense light. So almost all these are managed with proper eye care. I sometimes use eye drops, hashtag not sponsored, but don't let them stop you from exploring the wonders of the night sky.

Another deficiency of the human eye, of course, is that it can't zoom. You can't change the magnification, really, very easily, if at all. But as you came with a telescope, by swapping in different eye pieces. Can't change the aperture on a telescope either, but you can't change the eyepieces. And that causes the light to appear more magnified as it comes into your eye. But the total amount of light won't be magnified. You won't see it brighter because you have a higher magnification. You might see it more intense in it and a higher density of light, perhaps. But you can also get different filters to observe different objects and actually cut down on the light.

Now that we've covered the different problems with the human eye, we'll cover some of the nine idealities or systematic effects present in actual telescopes, refracting and reflecting. Now, as promised, in our cosmological telescopes, we often use lenses as well. These are not used in professional-grade instruments like the Kack or Webb or even... Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499.

This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. Loss supplies last. Priced invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Large ground-based telescopes, but they are used quite frequently in micro-tops. In fact, this is one of the original lenses from the Bicep Experiment, which I built became Bicep 2. That, of course, led to the story of Bicep 2 and the reason for my first book being called Losing the Nobel Prize.

I refer you to get that book on my website, Brian Keating.com slash books. The inability of Bicep 2 to win the Nobel Prize was nothing to do with the fact that it was refracting telescope. In fact, if it wasn't a refracting telescope, it probably would have never been built. And that's because the science that we needed to do only required relatively low angular resolution, about a half a degree or even less, to resolve these giant B-mode signatures that would be present if the universe experienced a period of hyper-expansion called inflation. That's what we're trying to see. The aftershocks of inflation are gravitational waves, primordial gravitational waves, not from black holes spiraling together in the relatively mature

universe of just a few billion light years distant from Earth. Those types of gravitational waves have been discovered since 2015 by my friend Barry Barish, Ray Weiss and Kip Thorne have interviews with all of those on this channel. And of course, Barry wrote the foreword to my second book, Think Like a Nobel Prize. And Kip Thorne is featured in my upcoming book in 2025 called Focus like a Nobel Prize. When you're Focus, get it like a telescope. So let's talk about these deficiencies and what wrong in different types of telescopes. So both refractors and reflectors suffer from non-idealities. There's no such thing as a perfect telescope. They all have flaws in them, and those flaws have to be introduced. We have to remove the effects that are caused by the system. Those are called

systematic effects. No amount of observation, no amount of statistics can get rid of those effects, unlike statistical errors or noise, which can be improved by taking more and more data over longer periods of time. Of course, when you take statistics, considerations into account, you don't actually improve linearly in time. In other words, if you take twice as much data, you don't improve or shrink your statistical error bars by a factor of two. You actually only strengthen by a factor of square root two. So it takes a long time to get the data much, much lower in statistical significance. But if you have a systematic error, there's no amount of observational data quantity that can overcome the deficiencies caused by an error

in your system. For example, if I was using this, which is nearly perfect for microwave astronomy, obviously if I was trying to look through it to see invisible astronomy, you wouldn't see anything. And that's because these absorb systematically all visible light, and you can't see through it. But microwaves go right through it. Similarly, if I were to use glass,

like this lens on this optical telescope, as a microwave optical element, it would absorb a tremendous amount of microwave energy. So these are different trade-offs that we do. Those are examples of chromatic effects, effects that depend on the color or wavelength of light. Now, for refractors, it's a particular problem because for fractors have a problem called chromatic aberration where different wavelengths

of light focus at different points, causing the fringing of colors to occur. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 dollar-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This affects the clarity, sharpness, resolution, and it's most noticeable in low-quality glass.

To get a very large lens and optical lens, this lens costs maybe a few dollars to make in a machine shop at Caltech where I was a postdoc, but a lens made of high-quality glass that's this size might cost 50 or even. $100,000. It's a large lens, 8 inch diameter. You see the holes. That's for mounting it. And this is actually made of high density polyethylene. Actually, it's ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene. Incredibly convoluted acronym, but it's actually one of the best materials. It's actually very low cost, and you can actually machine it to make the bi-convex shape that you see here. Now, a reflecting telescope suffers from no chromatic aberration because the mirror surface

reflects all wavelengths pretty much in the optical more or less perfectly. It doesn't do it for high energy, x-rays, and gamma rays. That's for another video. Now, both reflecting and refracting telescope suffer from spherical aberration. And actually, your eye can suffer from this too. And that's the fact that the spherical mirrors, which are easier to make than a parabolic mirror, which is actually technically required to focus light into a point. A spherical mirror doesn't do that perfectly. So you get what's called spherical aberration. That occurs with the lens shape as well. The lens is not a perfect sphere or perfect conic section. And that results in a blurred image when the light focuses at different physical geometric points. That's a big problem.

Reflecting telescopes suffer from another effect that refractors typically don't. And that's called coma. It's not the medical condition of being essentially brain dead. But actually, it's the fact that stars in a refracting telescope often appear stretched and they appear like a comet. And that's what the word coma means. Actually, coma means hair. But if you kind of think about a woman's hair as sort of a silhouette, appears just like a comet. And you see these effects in starlight as well. And you You want starlight in either reflecting telescope or refracting to be a pinpoint, ultra sharp. These stars are so far away. We can't actually see the expansive disks of, say, the sun.

They're way too far away. And so they should focus basically to what we call a point source in your retina or in a CCTV camera. Now, both refractors and reflectors suffer from thermal effects, both expansion and contraction over the night or over even a short period of time. The lens or mirror shape and position can be distorted due to thermal expansion. That affects the optical performance, especially in large. professional telescopes. Our telescopes, our optics are at 3 Kelvin, or at 40 Kelvin and even

colder than that. So we keep them exquisitely stable. And this is an area where your eye does better than a mechanical or even a telescope because your eyes inside your head, it's basically kept at the same temperature all the time. So it's very hard for your eyeball to change temperatures. I've been to the South Pole many times, and even when I'm there at negative 40 degrees Celsius, which is also negative 40 Fahrenheit, the eyeball never freezes in place. It stays the same warm, cozy temperature. Another optical effect is called vignetting. This occurs when some parts of the telescope's optical path block some of the incoming light, causing a darkening of the image at the edges. It's very common with reflecting telescopes because oftentimes the reflecting

telescope has another mirror in the center, and that's part of the Newtonian design, called a secondary. We don't have that in our Simon's observatory, large aperture, which is our reflecting telescope. But many telescopes, including Kek telescope and upcoming telescopes, like the giant Magellan telescope, have another mirror. And that other mirror, I'll show the diagram on the screen of a reflecting telescope, block some of the light that comes in. And you can also have diffraction where the light scatters off the secondary mirror, the structure that supports it.

There's also another structure called the spider, which holds the secondary mirror in place for a Newtonian telescope. And you can often see the effects, the diffraction spikes from those effects. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals. because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back. In images, including the Hubble Space Telescope, suffers from this.

The James Webb Telescope has an off-axis secondary, so the light doesn't actually come in through a path that would cause it to reflect or diffract around the secondary. So its images are different, but it has the fact that unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, that James Webb Space Telescope is made of panels. And those panels call scattering, which is an effect that afflicts both refracting and reflecting telescopes. And in fact, the web telescope was, of course, assembled like origami in space at the Lagrange Point L2,

it's about a million miles from the Earth. And they had to do that to fit it inside of the rocket faring when it was launched from South America on Christmas, 2021. And that causes it to be as large as it is, but it's made up of all these subpanels. Well, the subpanels have interfaces where these hexagonal shaped submers, about a meter across, where they come together. And that causes scattering. And you can actually see the spikes from this effect. the scattering and diffraction.

And James Webb Space Telescope, when you look at a point source like a star, shows six spikes surrounding each star. The Hubble Space Telescope shows four because it has a secondary support that has four-fold symmetry, and also the pixels are also four-fold in symmetry as well. Now, both refracting and reflecting telescopes require regular collimation, which is the alignment of mirrors, and refractors are much more stable and compact than reflecting telescopes. But both telescopes suffer from misalignment issues. So both the human eye and telescopes gather light differently to form images.

The cornea and the lens in the eye works similarly to a telescope's objective lens, although it's just one single lens in the human eye, and most telescopes have two. One called the eye piece where you put your eye, and one called the objective in the direction of the object. Our eyes are very similar to telescopes, but they also have these other effects. Human vision has different effects that make it less than ideal. And in fact, throughout history, these effects have been made clear, both from early astronomical images, sketched on cave walls in the Paleolithic era, to the beautiful artwork shown here by Vincent Van Gogh. So I want to show here Vincent Van Gogh's starry night and connected to some of its very interesting astronomical depictions that are shown there.

It's more than just a pretty picture. The actual atmospheric physics called Kolomogorav physics is captured within Van Gogh's beautiful illustration. So some say that Vincent Van Gogh may have suffered from xanthroopsia, a visual condition that causes a yellow tint in one's perception due to digitalis toxicity. Now, digitalis was a medicine used to treat epilepsy. Some historians say he may have been taking it and have this pigment issue causing the vibrant yellow as depicted there. Additionally, the swirling pattern have been compared to turbulence. And some say that he actually suffered from any particular eye disease. He may have suffered from near-sightedness, far-settiveness that was uncorrected.

and that may have led to the depiction that's shown in this beautiful image. Now, as bad as his eye disease might have been, it's nothing compared to what would later happen to his ears. I'm not going to get into that on this channel. You can look that up for yourself. So I hope you've enjoyed this deep dive into the eye and telescopes, including some thoughts that I hope to share with Andrew Hebramoran when I go on Huberman Lab podcast or when he comes on mind.

We have a lot in common and a lot of hopefully very interesting things to talk about. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or comments for Andrew. He's done a tremendous amount for discussing how our son, which is a star, my domain, of course, affects our mental well-being. And I'm hoping that we'll get to talk about those topics as well. So leave a comment down below. What would you like me to talk to Andrew Huberman about? USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%.

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