KAIST professor honored for eclipse video
A video clip of the total solar eclipse over North America last month by a Korean professor of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has been selected as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD).
The APOD, provided by the U.S. space agency and Michigan Technological University, is a renowned website featuring celestial pictures, and posts an image or photograph of the universe every day.
According to KAIST, Thursday, Oh Jun-ho, professor of mechanical engineering, recorded the cosmic event in Warm Springs, Ore., Aug. 21 and his three-minute video features pink solar prominences and a detailed corona stretching across the sky. U.S. citizens experienced the first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in 99 years on that day.
“The video frames were taken in Warm Springs, Ore., with equipment specifically designed by Oh Jun-ho to track a close-up of the Sun’s periphery during the eclipse. As the video ends, the Sun is seen being reborn on the other side of the Moon from where it departed,” the APOD said. Oh’s video clip can be watched at https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170912. html.
The KAIST professor has become the second Korean to make the APOD list following professional photographer Kwon O-chul, whose images have been posted on the website five times.
“I was able capture the solar eclipse thanks to months of preparation based on years of experience and trial and error,” Oh said.
Oh began chasing an eclipse in 1999 in Turkey and since then, he has shot them on 11 occasions.
Oh is known for his creation of Hubo, a multifunctional, walking humanoid robot that won the Darpa Robotics Challenge in 2015, held in the U.S.
The competition tested if robots could perform complex tasks in dangerous, human-engineered environments.