In Depth Finding distant stars and protecting your eyesight is all in a day's work for astronomy.
Teflon, memory foam, polarised sunglasses: plenty of everyday comforts were first developed for the space program.
But now the technology used to detect faint light from distant
galaxies in giant telescopes could help protect your sight with early
detection of the leading cause of sight loss.
Usually the engineers at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre build
parts for telescopes like Herschel. Launched in 2009, it's the largest
telescope ever sent into space and they built the camera it uses, called
SPIRE (Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver).
Now they've been working with the researchers at Cardiff University's
School of Optometry and Vision Sciences to develop what they're calling
a retinal densitometer. You look into it and it detects the amount of
light reflected by the retina, then it shines a nice bright light into
your eye and detects how that changes as your eye adapts back to dimmer
light again.
If it takes longer than it ought to - or longer than it did the last
time you got an eye test - then you could be showing the first signs of
age-related macular degeneration. And AMD is responsible for more than
half of all cases of sight loss.
Your eyesight in a pinhead
The macula takes its name from the Latin for "spot", and that's
exactly what it is: a small spot at the back of the eyeball in the
light-detecting retina. At just 6mm across, the macula provides the most
precise part of human vision.
Within that, there's an area just 1mm across called the fovea. This
pinhead-sized patch has the highest concentration of the cone cell
photoreceptors that let you recognise colours, see fine details and see
what's right in front of you - like the people you're looking at or the
screen on your smartphone. Without the macula, all you have is
peripheral vision.
The importance of the macula and fovea can even be manipulated to
improve display technology. That's the idea behind the Microsoft
Research Foveated 3D display project being shown off at SIGGRAPH this
month. Rather than wasting power creating parts of the image that will
fall into users' peripheral vision, this project cleverly uses head
tracking to identify what the fovea will see and render only those areas
in full detail.
But the macula is delicate as well as essential. As we get older, it
can degenerate. First straight lines start to look wavy and it's more
difficult to readjust to normal vision after seeing a bright light. Then
it gets harder to see the things you're trying to look at - and in
extreme cases, zooming in on a screen won't help, because you have a
blank spot in your vision.
There are some unpleasant but rate conditions that cause vision loss
for an unlucky few at a younger age but age-related macular degeneration
is one of the things many of us have to look forward to. In the UK,
nearly 5% of those over the age of 65 already suffer from AMD and among
the over 80s it's more than 12%.
Over 10 million people in the US already have some form of AMD. As it
progresses, you go from blurred vision to potentially not being able to
see faces, newspapers, phone screens or anything else you're trying to
look at directly. It has immense consequences for sufferers' lives and
independence.
Seeing the problem from space
So far, there are few ways to treat AMD. There are treatments being
developed but they're going to depend on spotting AMD before it starts
to affect your eyesight - that is, you need to know it's happening
before you can see it. And that's where the giant space telescopes come
in.
It turns out that the same instruments that help telescopes spot the
dimmest of distant stars can also detect faint light inside the human
eyeball.
One of the first signs that the macula is starting to not work as
well as it should is that it becomes slower at seeing the next thing.
Each time the macula responds to something you see, it takes longer
afterwards to regenerate the pigments the cone cells in the retina
produce in response to light.
Think about the afterimage you see after looking directly at a bright
light: that's the pigment, rhodopsin or visual purple, being produced
in response to light. It just normally isn't produced in such quantities
that that you notice. (The same thing happens when you rub your eyes
and see shapes, because pressure also causes the release of rhodopsin.)
By using the technology behind the photometers that telescopes use to
look at deep space, opticians will be able to check how fast the macula
regenerates that pigment. And when the earlier signs of failure are
caught, those new treatments will hopefully be available to halt the
degeneration.
In early tests, the UK Astronomy Technology Centre's retinal
densitometer is proving highly accurate so the next step is full scale
tests and making commercial machines. It could take a few years to
arrive, but pretty soon there will be a little bit of space technology
in your local optician