This award will partially fund travel by selected participants in the 2010 Meteorological/Light and Color in the Open Air Conference in Annapolis. These "Light and Color" conferences have been held since the 1970's to discuss research on optical phenomena in nature, especially light in the atmosphere and landscape. These topics are not only fascinating in themselves, but also cut across many different scientific disciplines: meteorologists interact with physicists and biologists, and gifted amateurs also present their findings before academics. Topics covered have included beetle irridescence, the optics of the rainbow, rainbows in paleolithic art and discussions of observations made by sailors stranded above the arctic circle. Topics which will be covered at the 2010 meeting will include: the optics of the rainbow; ice crystal haloes; sky colors; optics of the aurora; snowflake physics; and the applications of optics of the atmosphere in computer graphics and animation. There is also a strong artistic component to these meetings: pictures taken by participants are among the most striking in nature photography; one of the additional merits of this years meetings will be an art show of these photos at Boyden Gallery at St. Mary's College. The conference proceedings will be published in a special issue of the journal Applied Optics, which will appear about 1 year following the conference.
Broader Impacts
These meetings have not only inspired much research and several hundred papers on the subject of light and color in the landscape, but have served as the inspiration for a number of popular books on the subject, popular articles, a CD ROM collection of these papers and others on atmospheric optics, and a large number of popular lectures, both at the conferences and at the institutions of the attendees. The 2010 conference will have several features designed to promote a broad impact to the community at large, including an art show. Attendees at the conference are being asked to loan their best light and color photographs for a special art show which will be running concurrently with the conference at the St. Mary's College Boyden Art Gallery. The show will be advertised heavily in the St. Mary's County and Washington, DC area; the gallery is free and open to the public.
Public Lecture: Dr. Stanley Gedzelman, a long-time attendee of the conferences, will be giving a special lecture to the public (entitled "Meteorology and Art") a few days before the conference begins. The lecture will be free and open to the public, and again advertised throughout the local and Washington, DC community.
Keynote Speaker: The Keynote Speaker for each conference is carefully chosen to broaden the impact and interest of each conference. At this conference, we are inviting experts on computer graphics to discuss the interface between optics and graphics, especially as used in the production of animated films.
K-12 Outreach: The subject of the conference, the play of light in the landscape and atmosphere, is one which is truly of universal interest and spans many disciplines. One of the broadest impacts of the conference is how it can inspire people with interest in the physics of the natural world around us. Five local area high school science teachers will be given stipends to attend a special session and luncheon at the conference to discuss how to use the beauty of the natural world to inspire students to follow careers (or at least take interest in) the sciences.
This grant was used to fund the 10th International Conference on Color and Light in the Open Air, held at St. Mary's College of Maryland in June, 2010. There were several educational outreach activities associated with the conference, some held during the conference and several after it. The conference is a gathering of scientists from around the world who are interested in atmospheric optics (optics of the rainbow, mirages, the aurora, ice crystal halos, etc.); it is a good topic to interest the general public. During the conference we held two sessions open to the public; there was also an associated photographic exhibition of atmospheric optics photographs at St. Mary's College Boyden Art Gallery of 140 images from photographers around the world. In the first open session, five attendees from the conference took photos from the exhibition and discussed their scientific and artistic merit. In the second session, the invited speakers Ken Sassen and Bob Greenler gave general audience talks. We also made funding available for local area high school science teachers to attend these talks. Following the conference, the art exhibition traveled to the NSF as part of the NSF "Art of Science" program, where it was displayed from 1/9/2012-3/30/2012. Following this it went to the American Institute of Physics headquarters in College Park, MD, where it will be on display until 10/22/2012. There is some discussion of traveling it further, but no firm plans at this time. At the opening of the NSF display, Bob Greenler and David Lynch gave general-audience lectures on atmospheric optics. Both venues are open to the public. While the NSF grant did not pay for the original art exhibition, an extension to the grant paid for reprinting photographs, travel and other expenses related to the exhibitions. One other smaller item is that the PI (Charles Adler) gave a lecture at the college on atmospheric optics at the Boyden Art Gallery. This was at the invitation of Mary Braun, the head of the gallery.
