It’s big, cold, blue and 4.3 billion kilometres away. But astronomers using cutting-edge optics technology have taken an image of Neptune that is nearly as sharp as those taken from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), nestled in the mountains of Chile’s Atacama Desert, was recently outfitted with a new type of adaptive optics called laser tomography. Adaptive optics correct images for the turbulence of Earth’s atmosphere.
When scientists and amateur astronomers take images of stars, galaxies, planets or any celestial object, their main adversary is Earth’s atmosphere. Temperature fluctuations and air density cause turbulence, making it difficult to observe and photograph clearly. That’s really why we see stars “twinkle.”
But VLT’s new features can adjust for this.
Four incredibly bright
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