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Magellan II's Adaptive Optics Top Hubble's Resolution
muon-catalyzed writes "The incredible 'first light' images captured by the new adaptive optics system called Magellan|AO for "Magellan Adaptive Optics" in the Magellan II 6.5-meter telescope are at least twice as sharp in the visible light spectrum as those from the NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. 'We can, for the first time, make long-exposure images that resolve objects just 0.02 arcseconds across — the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away,' said Laird Close (University of Arizona), the project's principal scientist. The 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes in the high desert of Chile were widely considered to be the best natural imaging telescopes in the world and this new technology upgraded them to the whole new level. With its 21-foot diameter mirror, the Magellan telescope is much larger than Hubble with its 8-foot mirror. Until now, Hubble always produced the best visible light images, since even large ground-based telescope with complex adaptive optics imaging cameras could only make blurry images in visible light. The core of the new optics system, the so-called Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM) that can change its shape at 585 points on its surface 1,000 times each second, counteracts the blurring effects of the atmosphere."
Is it me, or is that summary incredibly difficult to read?
Try again after a cup of coffee.
It's you. It wasn't dummed-down, and nearly everything is these days.
Right in the summary we have a comparison between the 6.5 m Magellan telescope and the 8 ft Hubble.
I found it easy to read and don't feed the trolls!
I meant "dumbed".
Sorry.
I suspect it will take a bit more than coffee.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Just another reason we need space less and less. We can explore this vast and empty vacuum just fine from right here.
"The 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes in the high desert of Chile were widely considered to be the best natural imaging telescopes in the world "
WTF is natural imaging ?
Are other telescopes unnatural ?
They probably meant 'natural' as in 'direct imaging', instead of post-capture image processing to correct artifacts.
Is it me, or is that summary incredibly difficult to read?
Perhaps you need to adapt your optics? E.g. with reading glasses?
I think they're referring to visible light, not radio, IR, UV or X-Ray.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
As to the above drama about mixing measuring units, the article says:
These images are also at least twice as sharp as what the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) can make because the 6.5m Magellan telescope is much larger than the 2.4m HST.
So there you go. Both measurements in Imperial European Units.
But then I read on, and was pretty stoked to see them discovering things like this.
MagAO was then used to map out all the positions of the brightest nearby Orion Trapezium cluster stars and was able to detect very small motions compared to older LBT data, a result of the stars slowly revolving around each other. Indeed, a small group of stars called Theta 1 Ori B1-B4 was proved to be likely a bound “mini-cluster” of stars that will likely eject the lowest mass star in the near future (see figure 4). This result has just been published in the Astrophysical Journal.
Nice! I'd love to see a time-lapse video over the course of the next million years watching this black sheep star get flung out of its little flock.
fifth sigma, inc.
Hubble was sent into space with a major glitch in its primary mirror. While yes, we were able to give it, achem, corrective lenses for its near-sightedness, it was never able to perform to original specifications. This project, by comparison... doesn't have a defect in one of its most important components. So I don't know if this is an entirely fair comparison to make...
The fact is, they solve problems in two separate ways -- Hubble is a direct observation. There's no distortion, the light is the original and it's not smeared by atmospheric effect. Adaptive optics are amazing, but they're still additive in nature; You can photoshop, cut, and paste, but it'll never be quite as accurate as direct observation can be. That said, quite a lot can be done with it, and its a welcome addition especially in the age of limited scientific budgets for astronomy! I guess all I'm trying to say is... it's supplimentary, it is not a replacement for the kind of work Hubble did. We still need a replacement Hubble (obviously... with updated tech) for some observations.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What they rarely mention in these sorts of press releases (everyone with AO system has a "better than Hubble" press release) is that the cost of getting to that resolution is losing most of the light along the way. It's not hard to beat HST with perfect atmospheric correction, as Hubble is only a 2.4 m aperture, and nearly every AO system is on a larger telescope. It's just that the correction is achieved by sufficient optical contortions that only a small fraction of the original light actually makes it to the detector.
My personal experience is that even the largest and most sensitive AO system in the world (NIRC II on Keck II with laser guide star) still really struggles make an observation in 20 minutes that Hubble can do in 5 minutes. If anyone were to launch a >3 m aperture visual-band space telescope (NOT JWST, that's IR), it would blow all these AO systems out of the water.
the Magellan II 6.5-meter telescope... [w]ith its 21-foot diameter mirror
Oh, for... one or the other, c'mon.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It wasn't dummed-down, and nearly everything is these days.
stay FUCKING AWSOME Anonymous Coward!
Maybe if you had used the Magellan II telescope instead of the Hubble telescope to read it, it would have been clearer
I think naturel imaging is used to rules out interferometry
I suspect it will take a bit more than coffee.
Try adding just a touch of Ketamine, it takes that caffeine jitter away...
CAUTION:
Ketamine is not intended for use by humans and may be unlawful in your area. Additionally, some people do experience the side effect of waking up with their pants around their ankles.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
You do realize there's just a bit of time lag here?
The Hubble was supposed to launch in 1983 (delays in building and the Challenger disaster held it up till 1990). So, it's at best 30 year old tech (and actually since it was space rated, a good bit older than that).
The Magellan II is brand spiffy new and can take advantage of many things that Hubble can't since it needs to be at least somewhat rad hard.
Granted that Hubble has been upgraded, but I don't think it's a fair comparison.
If we ever get the James Webb Telescope launched, that might be a fairer comparison.
Astronomers were proposing to use Ares V to launch an 8 meter reflector into space. 1.5 meters larger than Megellan; 35% more collecting area and far above the atmosphere. That mirror would have been able to detect biosignatures on extrasolar planets.
Then Obama cancelled it, so you probably won't live to see such a thing.
Did you actually read his comment? Or just reply to the subject line?
Not to mention, only the ignorant think that "price" is only reckoned in dollars.
according to this 5 year old article .002ac)
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/08/12/moon-hoax-why-not-use-telescopes-to-look-at-the-landers/#.UhZC2_GB1xk
0.02 arcseconds is still an order of magnitude away from seeing the apollo lander (assuming 4 meters across, but 400,000,000 meters away =
getting there though,
I don't know what the current state of the art is, but once upon a time it was only possible to correct a for atmospheric variations over a very narrow field of view. You will notice that the first light images are of binary stars and not of whole nebulae or galaxies. I don't think this is an accident.
We can finally quiet the "moon landing was a hoax" nutjobs. With the ability to make long-exposure images that resolve objects just 0.02 arcseconds across — the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away", we can actually take pictures of all the junk we left behind as proof that we were actually there.
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
That only took 23 years (yes, I know, different tech). Still... Ne would kind of expect that 23 years later. 1/4 of a frickin millennium.
Screw mirrors and adaptive optics I want optical frequency antennas and a really fast computer.
It's you.
so from 100 miles up they can see me eye colour perfectly
ya just what we need more bullshit the nsa can use
What is this "dime" the summary speaks of?
As 'miles' are mentioned, it must be some American thing, so can anybody please explain?
So how does this compare with the VLT? Since that one has a bigger mirror (4 telescopes with 8.2 meter mirrors, which can be combined to create an even sharper picture). Not to mention the build-in lasers.
So when do we get the really cool pictures from Magelan II, in higher resolution than we got from Hubble?
Iconic photos like Mars:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Hubble.jpg
Jupiter:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Ancient_Storm_in_the_Jovian_Atmosphere_-_GPN-2000-000910.jpg
Saturn:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saturn_with_auroras.jpg
And the Hubble Deep Field:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg
And completely off-topic, how often do you see a color photo of the moon:
http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/im/moon-color-mosaic-NCarboni.jpg
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
We're in a new Golden Age for telescopes. It's remarkable what can be achieved now.
After Palomar there was a huge pause of 40-50 years with very little progress being made on optical mirrors. The new telescope engineering techniques are very impressive. Just imagine, there's a Thirty Meter Telescope in the works, and the odds are it will be a successful scope too. And that's not the only one, there's the GMT, the E-ELT, and so on.
I don't know if you are trolling, just making things up, or really need to get a better source of information.
Look up the actual original specs of the Hubble (e.g. this although there are better sources behind paywalls). They were hoping for a resolution on the order of 0.1 arcseonds. This is within a factor of 2 of the theoretical resolution limit of about 0.05 arcseconds for Hubble's mirror size at 500 nm. Latter upgrades pushed this down to about 0.06-0.073 arcseconds. The repaired Hubble was on spec as far as resolving power (if anything, higher resolution modes were less affected, as it was the wide field modes using the edge of the optics more that struggled), and upgrades exceeded those specs. But it would not have exceeded the resolution shown here of Magellan with that mirror. It was not about the detector being out of date.
You should be able to find plenty of talk that even before Hubble launched that ground based observation was started to exceed the resolution limit of Hubble. The main thing it had going for at the time was that Hubble could see faint objects while the high resolution ground techniques required much brighter objects. But as time went on, that limit dropped, and the list of things that Hubble could do that ground based on observations could grew shorter. This isn't just a recent issue, but has been a continual question in the whole development and operation history of HST when trying to determine if the expense was worth it.
And the fact that you try to associate adaptive optics as some software trick that fills in data with the same signal to noise ratio shows you fundamentally do not understand what it does. You should at least look at one of the many explanations on various telescope websites (instead of waisting time repeating it here). It is a mechanical process that affects how the light is gathered, increasing the signal to noise ratio (using your crude analogy).