Stroboscopic Visual Training for Coaching Practitioners: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Background: The importance of vision and its impact upon an athlete’s performance has long been recognized by elite athletic communities. In recent decades, stroboscopic training methods have been developed to help train athletes from a visual, perceptual, and cognitive perspective using strobe glasses. Objective: Herein a comprehensive literature review was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of strobe glasses in training collegiate and professional athletes. Methods: This comprehensive literature review investigates the origins, attention influences, tasks, practitioner takeaways, and cost feasibility of stroboscopic visual training.Results: The findings from this review show promise of benefits from utilizing strobe glasses during training scenarios, particularly for improving fast or impulsive tasks. Strobe glasses can be accommodated into varying sporting environments and training regimens while being affordable to athletic, coaching, and training departments or centers. Studies investigating the direct influence of stroboscopic training on subsequent performance demonstrate viable methods for strengthening fundamental visual abilities. Notably, these fundamental abilities have been shown to correlate with improved game performance. Though early results are promising, there are still significant areas for further research and more comprehensive designs of stroboscopic training studies. Conclusion: This review highlights potential benefits and existing research gaps concerning the use of stroboscopic eyewear as an intervention method in sports. The delineation of optimal applications for strobe glasses is undetermined; however, information presented in this review can be meaningfully applied by coaching practitioners who are considering adopting the technology

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure