11–20 of 59 posts
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!
the article makes it sound like the approach is so effective that it makes space-based telescopes unnecessary. is that true? does this mean that we should simply use ground-based 'scopes with adaptive optics?
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!
I'll bite. In those pictures of neptune, what is the KM-per-pixel were looking at? Is there a minimum focal length on this? Purely hypothetical: Could we basically see astronaut's footprints on the moon with this? What about looking into the window of the ISS?
I'm not sure if the focal length plays any role here. The resolution is usually limited by the telescope size (true for all telescopes, scales with 1/diameter) and atmospheric conditions (only relevant for ground based ones). At the distance of the moon (300,000 km), the physical resolution is 36 m/px and for the ISS (400 km) it is 5 cm/px.
If you want to play around with it, here's the formula: length_still_resolved = angular_resolution * distance
The angular resolution is 1.2 * 10^-7 (= 0.025 arcseconds converted to radian), distance and length_still_resolved have the same units.
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!
Theoretical limit as in diffraction limited? How will this technology "scale" to other frequencies and resolutions? Related to this diffraction limit: is there any overlap in the advances in microscopy and astronomy? For example, do advances in super-resolution microscopy[0] affect advances in optics in astronomy? Could advances in adaptive optics in astronomy somehow translate to microscopy?
(I'm also curious if this technology will make putting telescopes in satellites not worth the cost, but that question was already asked and answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557482)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution_microscopy
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!
the article makes it sound like the approach is so effective that it makes space-based telescopes unnecessary. is that true? does this mean that we should simply use ground-based 'scopes with adaptive optics?
Here is an image of them: https://www.eso.org/public/unitedkingdom/images/vlt-laser-cc...
Some parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are also not possible to observe from the ground. That's mainly UV and shorter wavelengths (X-ray, gamma-rays). We will always need space telescopes if we want to have these photons.
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!
Are the images natural colour, or have they been 'enhanced' in any way? i.e. is Neptune really that blue?
In short: Not sure how realistic this is, but one could make a realistic image from the new data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the article makes it sound like the approach is so effective that it makes space-based telescopes unnecessary. is that true? does this mean that we should simply use ground-based 'scopes with adaptive optics?
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…
Kinda hard to find the pics so here’s top 100 https://www.eso.org/public/images/archive/top100/
> The Very Large Telescope snaps a stellar nursery and celebrates fifteen years of operations
... so presumably most of those were not taking with this new technology.
Thanks for linking anyway, though!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are the images natural colour, or have they been 'enhanced' in any way? i.e. is Neptune really that blue?
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…