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Sharpest Images With "Lucky" Telescope
igny writes "Astronomers from the University of Cambridge and Caltech have developed a new camera that gives much more detailed pictures of stars and nebulae than even the Hubble Space Telescope, and does it from the ground. A new technique called 'Lucky imaging' has been used to diminish atmospheric noise in the visible range, creating the most detailed pictures of the sky in history."
...can the same be applied in space telescopes to get rid of the interference of the gas clouds they're looking at?
That is really quite amazing, and reminds me a bit of the jumping spiders whose retinas vibrate to increase their optic resolution.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Just went and looked up the Cat's Eye Nebula as taken by the Hubble. Lot more detail. What gives? Someone able to explain that, please?
Apologies for not having an account - but I would really like to ask a question for someone who understands the process.
the wikipedia entry on this subject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging states that new procedures take, '... advantage of the fact that the atmosphere does not "blur" astronomical images, but generally produces multiple sharp copies of the image'.
Does the correction algorithm apply a single vector to each image (ie the entire frame is shifted in unity) to produce the composite, or is a vector field applied to every pixel point in the image to shift individually the pixels toward their correct centres? Also if it is pointwise what type of transform is being applied, affine , perspective etc.
I invented this process in 1995.
here is my original post on
the sci.image.processing newsgroup
my old email address is no longer active.
new one is geopiloot at mindspring.com 9 reduce the numbers of ooo's in pilot to one
it was ironic that many people jumped out to say it wouldn't work at the time.
it does work and it works well. In fact most of the additive image processing now done by amateur astronomers everywhere using pc's software is based on my invention which I did not patent.
George Watson
From: George Watson (71360.2455@CompuServe.com)
Subject: virtual variable geometry telescope
This is the only article in this thread
View: Original Format
Newsgroups: sci.image.processing
Date: 1995/12/11
Has anyone implemented a virtual variable geometry telescope using
only a CCD attached to a normal non variable telescope?
It would work like this:
Take extremely short duration images from the CCD at a frequency
faster than the frequency of atmospheric distortion (1/60 sec I have
read is the minimal needed timeslice for physically corecting
atmospheric distortion in real time so maybe an exposure of 1/120 sec
would be short enough).
Choose via computer a high contrast image as a reference image.
Continue to take rapid short duration images and keep only the high
contrast ones with that have minimal displacement/offset from the
reference image.
Sum each of those acceptable images to a storage that will become the
final image.
What you should end up with is a final image that has minimal
atmosperic based distortion because all the low contrast and non
matching images will have been discarded.
Obviously you build an image over a longer period of time than with
real time optical correction but at perhaps lower cost.
Anyone know whether this has been proposed/done or researched?
--
George Watson
The opinions expressed here are those of the fingers
of George Watson only; not those of George Watson himself.
Please reply via this newsgroup. No Email unless requested,
Thanks.
View this article only
Newsgroups: sci.space.policy
Date: 1995/12/30