Seeing the Heavens in Hi-Def

Monday, September 17th, 2007

Astronomers are Seeing the Heavens in Hi-Def, from earth, not space, with remarkably cheap equipment:

Can a $20,000 camera coupled to a 60-year-old telescope shoot sharper images than the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope? Absolutely, say astronomers from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology.
[...]
To create their system they made the most of an existing technology, adaptive optics, and enhanced it with a super-high-speed digital camera that’s capable of shooting 20 images every second, says Nicholas Law, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar who worked on the Lucky project.

Adaptive optics is a way of correcting the atmosphere’s distortion of light as it enters the telescope. A sensor measures the distortion and corrects most of it using a flexible mirror that shifts the light back into straight lines. Then the Lucky camera shoots in rapid-fire fashion, and astronomers select the images that capture moments when atmospheric distortion is minimal.

Leave a Reply