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."

Comments

Surprised this hasn't been asked yet here

[earthforce_1]

Is the algorithm used to pick the best image, or part of an image open source?

i invented lucky imaging in 1995.

[geowiz]

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 here is my original post on the sci.image.processing newsgroup my old email address is no longer active.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