A team of astronomers from the US and the UK has obtained some of the clearest pictures of space ever taken. They were acquired using a new "adaptive optics" system which sharpens pictures taken from the Mount Palomar Observatory in California.
The images are twice as sharp as those from Hubble Space Telescope.
The new system, dubbed "Lucky", is the result of work by a team from Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
More at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6975961.stm
I've been listening to a few podcasts lately where they've been explaining how the adaptive optics work on the Keck Observatory. They say that they are getting better resolution than hubble in the IR wavelengths, but their AO system doesn't yet work on visible light and that's where Hubble trumps them.
Apparently the next generation AO system will work in visible light as well, which is fortunate because it will hopefully be ready around the time when Hubble will stop working.
This "lucky" term they use - I've heard them talk about this before, when basically all they're doing is Registax-style processing - that is, picking the sharpest images and throwing away the most distorted. Amateurs have been doing it for years and it's only in the last 2 years that professionals are starting to use the same techniques.
I don't know. I searched out the sharpest images I could find on the net - there's two Hubble ones and this "Lucky" one. Then cropped the Hubble ones to the same part of the image as the Lucky one. Hmmmm, maybe not twice as good, but Lucky is better to my eye. But I don't trust my ability to crop and save without introducing problems and maybe I didn't find the best resolution photos, so I'm loath to attach. Like to know what our local image experts think.
They're podcasts from the W M Keck Observatory Podcast Page. I only discovered these yesterday, and listened to a couple on the way home yesterday and on the way in this morning.
I was taken with the pillars of creation when it hit the deck as I guess most were but when I realised you could get a reasonable capture with a backyard set up as good as even a fair shot can be...I was very surprised that we could get something Hubble got..I did not know much at all back then and only a little more now...but well I reckon we do pretty good thats all I can say...
I have often thought stacking was a form of adaptive optics.
Imagine a holographic planetorium with all these fotos in 3d ...mmm one day maybe.
alex
Sorry about the duplication - I missed this original post - and I did a search before I started a thread!
I guess Luck refers to the fact that at 20 frames per second - you will get lucky on some shots - providing you have the right technology. You then have to have the algorithms enabling you to recognise a good shot from a poor one and the stacking part is fine.
It seems that the e2v CCD camera technology is a critical piece of the solution.
