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Best Images Yet Of Saturn's Moon Titan

Posted by timothy on from the spaceporn dept.

DoraLives writes "During recent commissioning observations of a new instrument designed for a completely different purpose, the European Southern Observatory managed to grab the best imagery yet of Saturn's largest moon. Although the imagery bears more than just a passing resemblance to some of the quainter maps of other planets there's no denying the superb, sub tenth arcsecond, resolution of the new images. And of course, if that's not good enough, they're sending a a little something to land on Titan next January. Should be interesting."

3 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe a bit off topic... by Phidoux · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... but this is another source of fantastic pics that have been taken of various objects in our solar system

    NASA Planetary Photojournal

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  2. Re:Focus! by Teclis · · Score: 5, Informative

    Did you read the article? The images were aquired by the ESO's VLA Telescope. Which is an array of smaller telescopes. Bottom line is that this is Ground Based Observing.

    I can also see that you know nothing or very little about astronomy. Atmospheric aberration is a big problem in ground based observing. There is really no solution yet, but there are solutions comming up soon (Infa-Red measurement corrections). The fact that surface DETAILS of a moon of a foreign planet were observed is quite amazing. I would wager that this experiment performed in space would provide images quite a bit crisper.

    I don't understand why you want to drag the HST into this, other than to discredit it without reason. As for replacement, I ask, WHY? You don't throw away something that works for something new. You can keep both. I don't see why Americans think this way. Keep the HST and let research continue in parallel with newer telescopes.

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  3. Re:"Images" by Agent+Orange · · Score: 5, Informative

    For god's sake, can we all please get our acronyms correct! This is important for astronomers, since we use a lot of them.

    ESA = European Space Agency (space based missions, including a share of hubble)
    ESO = European Southern Observatory (i.e. Astronomers and telescopes)
    VLA = the Very Large Array, a ***RADIO*** telescope run by the NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory). NRAO and VLA are run by americans. The VLA is in soccorro, new mexico.
    VLT = the Very Large Telescope. 4 8m ***OPTICAL*** telescopes in chile. Using NACO, which is an adaptive-optics systems, you can partially get around atmospheric problems and take high-resolution images.