THE GWAC DATA PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

GWAC will have been built an integrated FOV of 5,000 degree2 and have already built 1,800 square degree2. The limit magnitude of a 10-second exposure image in the moonless night is 16R. In each observation night, GWAC produces about 0.7TB of raw data, and the data processing pipeline generates millions of single frame alerts. We describe the GWAC Data Processing and Management System (GPMS), including hardware architecture, database, detection-filtering-validation of transient candidates, data archiving, and user interfaces for the check of transient and the monitor of the system. GPMS combines general technology and software in astronomy and computer field, and use some advanced technologies such as deep learning. Practical results show that GPMS can fully meet the scientific data processing requirement of GWAC. It can online accomplish the detection, filtering and validation of millions of transient candidates, and feedback the final results to the astronomer in real-time. During the observation from October of 2018 to December of 2019, we have already found 102 transients.

V. Sambasivan’s populist Othello for Kerala’s kathaprasangam

Through the verve and beauty of V. Sambasivan’s (1929–97) recitals for Kerala’s kathaprasangam temple art form, performed solo onstage to harmonium accompaniment, Shakespeare’s Othello has become a lasting part of cultural memory. The veteran storyteller’s energetic Malayalam-language Othello lingers in a YouTube recording, an hour-long musical narrative that sticks faithfully to the bones of Shakespeare’s tragedy while fleshing it out with colourful colloquial songs, verse, dialogue and commentary. Sambasivan consciously indigenized Shakespeare, lending local appeal through familiar stock characters and poetic metaphor. Othello’s ‘moonless night’ or ‘amavasi’ is made bright by Desdemona’s ‘full moon’ or ‘purnima’; Cassio’s lover Bianca is renamed Vasavadatta, after poet Kumaran Asan’s lovelorn courtesan-heroine. Crucially, Sambasivan’s populist introduction of Othello through kathaprasangam marks a progressive phase where Marxism, rather than colonialism, facilitated India’s assimilation of Shakespeare. As part of Kerala’s communist anti-caste movement and mass literacy drive, Sambasivan used the devotional art form to adapt secular world classics into Malayalam, presenting these before thousands of people at venues both sacred and secular. In this article, I interview his son Professor Vasanthakumar Sambasivan, who carries on the family kathaprasangam tradition, as he recalls how his father’s adaptation represents both an artistic and sociopolitical intervention, via Shakespeare.

Measuring Gravity Wave Parameters from a Nighttime Satellite Low-Light Image Based on Two-Dimensional Stockwell Transform

Atmospheric gravity waves are a kind of mesoscale disturbance, commonly found in the atmospheric system, that plays a key role in a series of mesospheric dynamic processes. When propagating to the upper atmosphere, the gravity waves will disturb the local temperature and density, and then modulate the intensity of the surrounding airglow radiation. As a result, the presence of gravity waves on a moonless night can usually cause the airglow to reveal ripple features in low-light images. In this paper we have applied a two-dimensional Stockwell transform technique (2DST) to airglow measurements from nighttime low-light images of the day–night band on the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership. To our knowledge this study is the first to measure localized mesospheric gravity wave brightness amplitudes, horizontal wavelengths, and propagation directions using such a method and data. We find that the method can characterize the general shape and amplitude of concentric gravity wave patterns, capturing the dominant features and directions with a good degree of accuracy. The key strength of our 2DST application is that our approach could be tuned and then automated in the future to process tens of thousands of low-light images, globally characterizing gravity wave parameters in this historically poorly studied layer of the atmosphere.

Hey, You, Get Out of My Womb!

This chapter focuses on women writers who have challenged the traditional identification of pregnancy as a standard and "natural" aspect of female existence, depicting childbearing instead as a destabilizing experience and the fetus as an alien, occupying presence within the mother. Takahashi Takako's 1969 "Kodomo-sama" uses an "invasive pregnancy" trope, to chart a woman's pre-partum anxieties that her unborn child is a malevolent spirit, fears amplified by the eerie behavior of her six-year-old daughter. In Takekawa Sei's "On a Moonless Night" (1984), this alienation is explicit, as a woman's ambivalent feelings about her own adulthood elide with her irrational fear of insects to produce a gothic nightmare of impregnation by an enormous bee. Finally, Ogawa Yoko's 1991 Pregnancy Calendar chronicles the revulsion felt by a young woman about her older sister's pregnancy, which she feels compelled to destroy to prevent the parasitical fetus from upsetting her family's delicate balance.

Tsunami!

The 1867 tsunami described in the previous chapter was, as the world has recently witnessed, scarcely an unusual event. Nor was the scene of destruction that followed. Elsewhere in this book we emphasize how the world’s rush, since the 1950s, to expand the size of cities has been driven by an increase in global population. Like a box with flexible sides, the city expands to embrace all those who favor the convenience, bustle, and economic opportunities of urban life. When lateral expansion is no longer feasible, as in the walled holy city of Bhaktipur in Nepal, or the confined economic and cultural island powerhouse of Manhattan, the city expands upward. When both lateral and upward expansion are confined, the size of dwelling units inevitably contracts. Few citizens leave these urban black holes, and when they do, they invariably choose to swell the ranks of another city. Yet one other type of place on our planet has beckoned since ancient times—coastlines of continents, especially the earth’s temperate and tropical shores. It has been estimated that 400 million people live within 20 meters of sea level and within 20 kilometers of a coast, many of them within a few kilometers of the beach. Precise numbers are difficult to pin down because census compilations rarely list a household’s height above sea level or its distance from the sea. Some idea of mankind’s curious predilection to gravitate shoreward can be obtained by viewing the earth from space on a moonless night. Seen from above, the coastlines of continents and islands are illuminated festively by electric light bulbs. The attraction here is not so much the views nor even the fish: coastlines are trade routes and, being the termini for the world’s rivers, streams, and subsurface aquifers, are nearly always endowed with a bountiful supply of freshwater for agriculture, as well as for thirsty populations and industries. This, of course, is why many of the world’s largest cities are seaports: London, New York, Karachi, Calcutta, Hong Kong.

Andrew Keller. 22 August 1925 – 7 February 1999

Born in Budapest in 1925, Andrs Keller was the only child of Jewish parents. He entered the University of Budapest in 1943 on a Jewish quota to study natural philosophy. Studies became increasingly difficult because of the activity of fascists in the university as Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany and was expected to be seen to pursue an anti–Semitic policy. Perhaps inevitably, he had to join a Jewish labour battalion, which is where Jewish men of military service age were sent instead of into the armed forces. After several days at a drafting centre in a Budapest brickworks, he was taken east to Ruthenia, which was in Slovakia and is now in the Ukraine, and was put to work building airfields. His battalion was moved around and it is difficult to know exactly where he was sent and when. However, one possible fixed point is that he remembers his train alongside a train of German troops who were celebrating the assassination of Hitler (as they thought), which would indicate a date very soon after the 6 July 1944 plot; false rumours of its success had been circulated initially to aid in the hunt for those involved. The food was poor and they were overworked, so they supplemented their diet by cooking mushrooms on shovels. The Russians were advancing and almost completely encircled Ruthenia, leaving just one narrowing corridor towards the west. As the work battalion was being marched towards it, Keller and a friend jumped the column into nearby undergrowth and hid. For several days they lived off the land and then separated as Keller wanted to wait until the Russian front had passed by. He hid behind hay in the roof space of an abandoned barn and was nearly found when the barn was searched; however, the soldiers did not look behind the hay, they just prodded it and departed. Keller watched the Russian troops occupy the village led by a mounted cavalry officer followed by an ox cart. He heard later that only one of his group survived the winter of 1944/45. He tried to work his way westwards behind the front, but was soon picked up by the Russians near to Szatmr (now known by its Rumanian name of Satu–Mare), who sent him to a displaced persons' camp in Bessarabia in Rumania. Although the Russians were tolerant, they left the day–to–day running of the camp to the senior German prisoners, who made life particularly hard for a young Jew. Keller noted batches of prisoners being taken away in trains, and he suspected, correctly, that they were being taken deep into Soviet territory. He decided to escape, and on the next moonless night he managed to crawl under three rolls of barbed wire where they had been stretched across a depression in the ground, and then over a wooden palisade that collapsed under him and alerted the guards. However, the guards did nothing, Keller surmising that they had orders to stop escapers they could see, but no orders that told them what to do if the fence fell over. He ran into the night, unhurt, and started once again to trek back to Budapest. Initially he reached Bucharest, where he was helped by a Jewish resident called Goldfarb, and finally back to Budapest, which he reached in February 1945, shortly after the city's liberation by the Red Army. Most of the surviving remnant of Hungarian Jews was in Budapest, the majority of the prewar Jewish population of 600 000 having been deported to death camps during the spring of 1944. These included Keller's father, uncle and aunt, who were all sent to Buchenwald and never seen again. At that time his young cousin had been sent across Budapest to his mother, with the family gold hidden in the head of her doll, and together they survived the holocaust, as did his paternal grandparents.

Big Island Cities at Night

ABSTRACTPhotographs taken during a clear, moonless night from the walkway of the dome of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea show light trespass from street lighting in Hilo and in Waimea and the sky glow from the growing area around Kona. More full cut-off fixtures would help to prevent deterioration of the quality of the Mauna Kea site.

On the spectroscopy of auroral green line radiation

In a recent paper by the authors on “Spectroscopy of the Light from the Night Sky,” a description was given of the development and the construction, with optical details, of a high light power spectrograph suitable for photographing the spectrum of the light of the moonless night sky and the spectra of auroral displays. Preliminary experiments were carried out with this instrument in England and in Canada, and a considerable number of spectrograms recorded with the instrument were reproduced and included in the paper.