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I'm a PhD student working with data of globular clusters from this instrument for quite some time now. I will be happy to answer your questions!
Thanks!
I'm a PhD student working with data of globular clusters from this instrument for quite some time now. I will be happy to answer your questions!
How does it compare to my amateur attempts with a 12" Newton https://www.flickr.com/photos/joelkuiper/42502865635/ :p ? All kidding aside, do you think there is some scientific value in the efforts of hobby astronomers and astrophotographers around the world?
Also, how are you overcoming flexure and mirror flop with your setup!? I have troubles keeping a 6" stable for a minute with a reasonable mount. Do you have more info on your setup anywhere?
Also, is there a way to determine how much blurring is happening from gravitational waves? In other words, if a ripple in spacetime washes across the space between us and a far away star, will the star become fuzzy like the schlieren distortion on a hot day here on earth? (faraway objects become ghostlike as heat from the hot ground alters the air density between observer and target)
This is very exciting. I'd love to see some of this make its way into amature equipment. Technology has helped us go past what would have been though of as possible with similar optics equipment 50 years ago. For the most part, optical mirrors and lenses are the same but what we can now do with them has changed quite a bit. For example, here is a video of Mars through a small telescope: http://i.imgur.com/8juHPdn.gif…
See the work here and the comparison to Lucky Imaging using iirc. Avistack: https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/49...
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We can achieve a very high resolution from the ground but only in a very small field of view. To cover one typical HST image with MUSE at the VLT, we would need a mosaic of hundreds of exposures. The reason for this are the four artificial guiding stars from the lasers. The closer they are together on the sky, the more atmospheric distortion you can correct. Here is an image of them: https://www.eso.org/public/united…
Does adding more lasers fix the field of view problem?
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Adaptive optics is really only effective in the infrared. And really only in the near-infrared, as past 5 microns, we can't really see through the atmosphere. In the visible, ground-based can't match space observatories (in the visible, the atmospheric turbulence is way harder to correct for).
> In the visible, ground-based can't match space observatories (in the visible, the atmospheric turbulence is way harder to correct for). The image this article is about is mostly in the optical (MUSE only goes from 465nm to 930nm; and the synthetic filters used in the MUSE image [4] seem to be quite close to the used HST filters). > And really only in the near-infrared, as past 5 microns, we can't really see through…
I don't think past 5 microns there's been a lot of science done from the ground (not counting SOFIA). Practically, I think everyone is waiting for JWST. A lot of the interesting molecular lines also get absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere.
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Are the images natural colour, or have they been 'enhanced' in any way? i.e. is Neptune really that blue?
I see this question a lot. I used to have an obsession with 'true color'; images felt fake otherwise. Artificial. I'm a working scientist now, and my view has changed. I realize how limited our senses are. How much of the world--of the universe--I'd miss by restricting it to just what my eyes can see natively. Even among colors that I can see, but perhaps the signal is too faint ... I'm a lot more tolerant of color-m…
This is very exciting. I'd love to see some of this make its way into amature equipment. Technology has helped us go past what would have been though of as possible with similar optics equipment 50 years ago. For the most part, optical mirrors and lenses are the same but what we can now do with them has changed quite a bit. For example, here is a video of Mars through a small telescope: http://i.imgur.com/8juHPdn.gif…
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The advantage of MUSE is that you get all color information, i. e. the flux at any wavelength from blue to red. In principle, one can use this together with the sensitivity curve for our eyes to construct a natural image. In this case, I think, they tried to imitate the color scheme from the Hubble image which is more limited. In short: Not sure how realistic this is, but one could make a realistic image from the new…
Could one use that information the other way around to make estimates for expected "missing data" in Hubble images taken in areas where VLT has not looked yet, for example to decide where to look next?
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I see this question a lot. I used to have an obsession with 'true color'; images felt fake otherwise. Artificial. I'm a working scientist now, and my view has changed. I realize how limited our senses are. How much of the world--of the universe--I'd miss by restricting it to just what my eyes can see natively. Even among colors that I can see, but perhaps the signal is too faint ... I'm a lot more tolerant of color-m…
I think the beauty is lost on me when I don't know what the color means. I either want the real deal or to know what the mapping is so I can appreciate that. Otherwise it's just a pretty picture.
Agreed! This is important. Scale bars would be nice too, as well as info on other pre-/post-processing. Usually all this is in an associated publication (which is hopefully freely available), since it usually takes a surprising amount of information to fully understand an image like this.
> beauty is lost on me > pretty picture
Pick one ;) Sometimes we can find things beautiful without fully understanding them (arguably this is always the case). For me, knowing whether it’s derived from real measurements is what matters. But everyone’s threshold is different. I’ve seen beautiful simulated data too, but that’s something different again — more like the beauty of an equation to me.