Photonics & Imaging

As the editor of Photonics Tech Briefs, I cover laser technology for a living. They’re pretty fascinating devices, but that doesn’t mean I ever wanted to have a laser beam shot into my eye. Unfortunately, Father Time and our own bodies do not always give us a choice. I was recently diagnosed as a prime candidate for narrow angle...

Engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center and amateur radio operators around the world collaborated to reconstruct an image of Earth sent to them from three smartphones in orbit. The joint effort was part of NASA's nanosatellite mission, called PhoneSat.

The SPIE Defense Security & Sensing Show in Baltimore, which began on Monday and ends today, provided attendees with an exhibit hall full of new products and technologies. If you weren’t at the show, here’s some of what you missed:

Dr. Andrew Watson works on models of human vision and applies them to visual technology. The Founder and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Vision, he is also a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, of the Association for Research in Vision and...

Three NASA scientists teamed up to develop and demonstrate NASA's first wide field-of-view soft X-ray camera for studying "charge exchange," a poorly understood phenomenon that occurs when the solar wind collides with Earth's exosphere and neutral gas in interplanetary space.

A new NASA-developed, laser-based space communication system will enable higher rates of satellite communications similar in capability to high-speed fiber optic networks on Earth.The space terminal for the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD), NASA's first high-data-rate laser...