ESO's Very Large Telescope Now Delivers Images Sharper Than Hubble (eso.org)

ffkom shares an excerpt from a press release via the European Southern Observatory: ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has achieved first light with a new adaptive optics mode called laser tomography -- and has captured remarkably sharp test images of the planet Neptune, star clusters and other objects. The pioneering MUSE instrument in Narrow-Field Mode, working with the GALACSI adaptive optics module, can now use this new technique to correct for turbulence at different altitudes in the atmosphere. It is now possible to capture images from the ground at visible wavelengths that are sharper than those from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The combination of exquisite image sharpness and the spectroscopic capabilities of MUSE will enable astronomers to study the properties of astronomical objects in much greater detail than was possible before.

Comments

Slashdot, please help clean up Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Please Slashdot, can you stop all these trolls from polluting the Slashdot space. In the past the comments by users were of an interesting nature related to the subject story, but now on 5% maybe is about the story as trolls post rubbish about Politics, Defamation, Racist and such other crap. I have emailed you before but as usual not one slashdot company person could be bothered to reply. Moderation is not really working, as there are only 5 points per moderator so it can take ages to clean up threads. Perhaps you could keep track of users (even if they post AC) and if they collect enough moderations points they can be banned to help clean up this space, unless of course Slashdot like to have a polluted comments space that turns most users away from reading or participating.

Re:Slashdot, please help clean up Slashdot

[hcs_$reboot]

Funny how people reply to this obvious troll, like if it was a serious claim. Anyway we should keep AC posting as it is useful sometimes (and moderation does work).

Re: Slashdot, please help clean up Slashdot

[ArchieBunker]

In the past the trolls were funny and interesting. Natalie Portman and hot grits, the saga of OpenSourceMan, The Turd Report, even OGG THE CAVEMEN until the cops lock filter silenced him. Now its just APK and the anti trump guy.

Re:Aim it at the moon...

[Zocalo]

And possibly damage the telescope too. The moon is vastly brighter than the kinds of things the VLT is meant to image, so if its optics and filters can't deal with that it would be bad. ISTR reading a response from one of the Hubble team on the question of what kind of images the telescope would produce if it were pointed at the Earth, and the response was basically a pure white frame because the amount of light captured, even at night, would overwhelm the telescope even at their fastest possible exposure settings, and would probably cause permanent damage as well.

Besides, which fake moon landings derp is going to accept the picture as genuine when they already discount the evidence provided by the laser reflectors left on the moon by three of the Apollo missions and two of the Soviet Lunakhod missions? The reflectors are still in use, so there's no reason why they couldn't acquire a suitable laser and bounce their own signal off them if they really wanted to, but then they'd need to discount their own evidence and it might detract from what this really is - a pathetically lame attempt to get some attention like those who claim the Earth is flat, so that's never going to happen.