2009-03 March ofc/nfoec

Contributed by C. David Chaffee of FiberToday.com 

The Optical Fiber Conference (OFC), which kicked off with the Executive Forum yesterday, is nothing if not a direct look at the fiber optics industry as we now know it. 

For many years back in the 1980s, it was exciting, new and innovative. There seemed to be no end to its potential, as Bell Labs was thriving and just beginning to understand that fibers could handle many wavelengths and lasers could be tunable. Then there was the build-up in the 1990s when OFC became the fiber version of SuperComm. Its exhibits area grew to new heights, transmission rates got to 2.5 Gbps and then 10 Gbps—a huge milestone—and WDM and DWDM started to become market realities. The culminating show was in Anaheim, with more than 37,000 attendees shepherded between the convention center and their hotels by high-booted policeman. 

The industry, and the show, have become more sober since then. There is still room for innovation, of course. (Whenever you are dispatching photons down a fiber there seems to be an opportunity for creative thought.) While Bell Labs is far smaller than it was in its halcyon days, research is coming from many more corners of the world. The conference will always gravitate to major markets and FTTH is included in a number of platforms, although now there are entire shows that only focus on FTTH.

It is symptomatic of the industry that the company of one of the three plenary speakers, Philip Morin's Nortel, is now in bankruptcy. The show has always been a place for new beginnings—we have met countless individuals who are with companies different from the one we knew them from—and OFC has recognized this by placing the emphasis on getting jobs this year. 

In recognition of the fact that it is the largest global fiber optics show, Shri Goyal, chairman of BSNL, the largest carrier in India, will also be a keynote speaker. Some of us will never get tired of hearing how nations we have little understanding of are using fiber optics to better their quality of life. 

As with any show, even ones as big and as ongoing as this, there are and will be concerns. There is a Service provider summit; but will enough carriers be there to attract the major systems vendors? That is important because the components vendors need them to be there so they can sell to the systems vendors. Cisco and Fujitsu will be advertising. Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson will not. NEC and Huawei are corporate sponsors.                  

Meanwhile, reassuringly, the length and breadth of technical papers continues in force. This is the engine of innovation and it has not dimmed in the fiber optics industry. At the toughest point in the downturn earlier this century, which was much worse than what we are going through now, companies like Corning and Ciena refused to cut back on their R&D budgets. They knew, they absolutely knew, that broadband would continue to grow and that fiber optics would continue to be the medium of choice to get us there.                   

That is the sustaining force of fiber optics, a force so ably demonstrated by OFC. Other conferences may crash and burn along the way, or may wander around changing their names and their dates, but OFC will not waver, for the ultimate goals are still well ahead of us. They include the truly all-optical network and the day every premise in the world is connected to fiber. Until those days arrive, OFC will be here.

2009-03 March ofc/nfoec

By Patricia Daukantas

The International Year of Astronomy (IYA) continues with one project to measure light pollution around the world and another project to increase awareness of that really bright star in the daytime sky.

The annual GLOBE at Night program asks participants to look for the constellation Orion at night, compare their view of the stars to a chart of stellar brightnesses, and report their observations—no telescope necessary. You can see more (and dimmer) stars in an area of low light pollution than in an area of high light pollution (such as large cities).

Yesterday’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” was a map showing the results of last year's stargazing effort. Because of the IYA, the sponsors are hoping for even more participation from every inhabited continent. This year’s program, which always coincides with the appearance of Orion in the early evening sky, runs until Saturday, March 28.

This year, the vernal equinox falls on March 21, and NASA has declared it “Sun-Earth Day.” The U.S. space agency has set up a special site with podcasts, video podcasts, a webcast and a “space weather media viewer” that lets you see the Sun in a variety of wavelengths (as well as auroral activity on Earth). There’s even a public-outreach observing challenge for amateur astronomers.

Remember: Always practice eye safety when observing the Sun, whether or not there’s an eclipse going on. A safe method to look at the Sun is to take two sheets of white cardboard, make a pinhole in one of them, and use that sheet to project an image of the solar disk onto the other piece of cardboard. With this method I got enough detail to observe the June 2004 transit of Venus from start to finish.

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2009-03 March astronomy

By Patricia Daukantas

By now, I hope most OPN readers have had a chance to read the feature articles in this month’s issue of the magazine. I also hope you’ve been able to find the online-only list of additional references and resources, including links to “star parties” on four continents.

The past few months have been great for astronomy, as Comet Lulin (now fading) put in a special appearance and the planet Venus has been dazzlingly brilliant. Hubble Space Telescope scientists continue to release awesome images. And tonight, if all goes well, NASA will launch Kepler, a spacecraft dedicated to finding Earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy.

As you may have noticed, Optics Express, OSA’s open-access journal, published a special focus issue on astrophotonics back in February. The guest editors describe astrophotonics as “the interface of astronomy and photonics,” and it’s an interesting field in itself.

Astronomers may be stereotyped as folks with their minds focused solely on the sky, but in reality a fair number of them are techies with a passion for building the cutting-edge equipment that will extend human vision farther and farther. I got acquainted with this phenomenon in the early 1990s, when I spent a summer interning at Kitt Peak National Observatory.

Back then, one of the hot new developments in instrumentation was called “multi-object fiber-fed spectroscopy” – a blend of fiber optics and robotics. The device was designed for those situations when a number of target objects fit into the field of view of the telescope. A small “button” containing a prism would hold one end of an optical fiber at the desired spot in the focal plane, and the other end of the fiber would remain connected to the business end of the spectrograph. Between exposures, a robotic arm would move the button to the target site for the next desired object. A single multi-object spectrograph could have a dozen or a hundred fibers.

What struck me at the time was the amount of work several astronomers at Kitt Peak and other institutions put into designing and building these instruments so that the rest of the astronomical community could take advantage of them. Over the years, other astronomers have joined optical scientists and engineers in putting in countless hours on the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments, both space-based and ground-based, for the benefit of the whole scientific community.

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2009-03 March astronomy