--- Two Easy Pieces: a Double Program with Two Presentations ---

I. An expedition through darkest optics, with gun and pinhole camera

You probably made a pinhole camera in the second grade, so of course you know what one is. Google returns more than 700,000 hits, starting from the 5th century BC.

But how much do you really know about a pinhole camera?

II. A cool new way to mold lenses

Speaking of the infrared, the thermal IR spectrum is getting interesting again because of new digital image-forming technologies, such as uncooled bolometer arrays. These devices still need lenses to form their images, but if we want to use an aspheric surface here and there in an optical design, conventional wisdom only offers us expensive diamond-turned components or molded chalcogenide glasses. You will get an early look at some lens design options that will use a new (patent pending) technology: cold powder molding. You will see how an infrared lens can be made inexpensively, even one with a completely free-form shape!

This new approach to manufacturing offers lenses in high volume for the infrared, out to 20 or 50 microns wavelength, with excellent transmission and a variety of available material properties, for an attractively low cost. We can now make spherical and aspheric infrared lens components, diffractive infrared optical elements, and even infrared lens and prism arrays, with almost the same convenience we knew and loved when molding optical plastic!

Bill Plummer

Bill Plummer received his AB and PhD degrees in Physics from the Johns Hopkins University, where he worked with Prof. John Strong in infrared planetary astronomy. He joined Polaroid in 1969, in time to work closely with Edwin Land and Jim Baker on the SX-70 camera and a lot of other commercial products, and for more than twenty years was Director of Optical Engineering. He has published 40 papers and has given as many invited talks around the world. He has 96 US patents for optical, mechanical, electronic, and chemical inventions, with a few more pending. He has received the David Richardson Medal, the Joseph Fraunhofer Award, and the Robert M. Burley Prize from the Optical Society of America. He is a Fellow of the OSA and of the SPIE and is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. For some years he has also been a Senior Lecturer with the Mechanical Engineering Dept at MIT. Bill has been an optical engineering consultant since 2001, and is founder and president of WTP Optics, Inc.

Adaptive Optics In Medical Research Imaging

Medical research of disease progression often relies upon mouse models, which involves sacrificing animals at different stages of the disease to be able to study effects over time. This requires statistical studies of disease with large numbers of animals and only provides periodic snapshots of the disease. In vivo retinal imaging, by contrast, is a powerful tool that allows one to follow a single animal over time, but aberrations in the mouse eye limit the best possible resolution that can be obtained.

Adaptive optics has been successful in correcting phase aberrations introduced by the atmosphere in astronomical imaging. This technique recently has been extended to ophthalmic imaging in humans. In this talk I will briefly discuss the motivation for in vivo imaging and I will present the current technique our lab uses for imaging the mouse retina. Finally, I will explain difficulties that arise when applying adaptive optics to mouse retinal imaging and how we implement adaptive optics into our imaging system.

David Biss

David Biss received his Ph.D. in optics from the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics in 2005. His thesis, "Focal Field Interactions from Cylindrical Vector Beams," dealt with the interaction of small particles and edges with focused inhomogeneously polarized beams. After graduation David left Rochester, NY and moved to Boston to pursue a position as a post-doctoral researcher at the Schepens Eye Research Institute. He is currently working with the Advanced Microscopy Program at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, to develop an adaptive optics system for in vivo imaging of the mouse retina.

New Tools to Search for Planets Orbiting Stars Other Than the Sun

Since the discovery of the first exoplanet, 51 Peg, in 1995, research on exoplanets has exploded. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has taken a leadership position in this field and is involved in a broad range of programs to further our understanding the census, dynamics and evolutionary history of planetary systems. In this talk I will briefly review the technique and methodology of exoplanet observation. I will then give a survey of some the tools the CfA has been developing to expand the horizons in this field. Finally, I will discuss and compare three CfA echelle spectrographs that illustrate some of the nuances and challenges of searching for the ultimate prize in exoplanet research, the detection of earth sized planets orbiting solar-like stars in the habitable zone.

Andrew Szentgyorgyi

Andrew Szentgyorgyi is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) specializing in optical instrumentation. Andrew completed his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1986 , building an atmospheric Cherenkov telescope on Maui to search for sources of very high energy (1 TeV) gamma rays, After graduate school, he joined the Columbia University faculty, concentrating on X-ray astronomy instrumentation. Dr. Szentgyorgyi moved to Cfa to work on metrology for the Chandra grazing incidence X-ray optics, but in 1993 he joined the optical and infrared instrumentation group, building a number of cameras and spectrographs for CfA gorund based telescopes.