3.6 Nourbakhsh. The Kuwait Oil Fires: an Environmental Disaster
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Figure 3: Raw Data From An Actual Image
human psyche. It causes us to ask new questions and most importantly wonder. When I look at this image, I like to Once we have calibrated our frames to our specific think that maybe around one of those trillion stars there is camera, we are ready to render our final image. To do this, a planet, and on this planet there are billions of creatures we first stack all of our frames and run them through an such as ourselves. Maybe one day we will realize the image subtraction software program, allowing us to take reality of this fantasy, and our understanding of our place out any inconsistencies in our data from things such as in the universe will forever be changed. atmospheric pressure and temperature deviations giving us a super crisp calibrated image. References Once we have calibrated and stacked our image, we are given some artistic freedom. Depending on the soft- [1] Erica Fahr Campbell. “The First Photograph Of The Moon”. In: Time (Dec. 2013). URL: https:// ware you use, there are many different functions you can time.com/3805947/the-first-photographuse to make your final image more aesthetically appealing of-the-moon/ (cited on page 29). (see figure 4). [2] Berta Margalef-Bentabol et al. “Observations of the initial formation and evolution of spiral galaxies at 1 < z < 3 in the CANDELS fields”. In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 511.1 (Mar. 2022), pages 1502–1517. DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stac080. arXiv: 2201.06334 [astro-ph.GA] (cited on page 29).
Figure 4: Final image Conclusion While astrophotography can seem like a very technical and scientific process, it can also be viewed as an artistic one. As our technology has become more advanced, astronomers have relied less on astrophotography as a form of data collection. Due to this, astrophotography has shifted from a strictly scientific endeavor to one in which science and art mesh. I think that there is an inherent beauty found in the cosmos, and what makes it beautiful is its distance and invisibility from us. Our primative biology was never meant to travel to space or see these nebulas and galaxies thousands of light years away, but through technology and science we are able to explore realms not even thought to exist. Perhaps this image does not contribute to the furthering of our scientific knowledge, but I think it has vast implications on the
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The Kuwait Oil Fires: an Environmental Disaster By Mitra Nourbakhsh ’22 In January 1991, Iraqi forces were in the midst of a rushed retreat from Kuwait at the end of the Arabian Gulf War. Embarrassed by Iraq’s defeat at the hands of a US-led coalition, Saddam Hussein ordered his armies to carry out one last act of war: they set on fire over 700
of Kuwait’s oil wells. Hussein hoped to inflict a blow on Kuwait’s oil production infrastructure, a huge money maker for the country and the cause of the Arabian Gulf War, and his plan worked almost too well. The wells blazed, columns of toxic smoke blocked
