ESO's very large telescope captures sharp images of Neptune

Astronomers from the Parbad Observatory in Chile have made a first light with a state-of-the-art adaptive optics mode for the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) , created to eliminate interference caused by the Earth's atmosphere. Images published by the European Southern Observatory using the adaptive optics process have rendered a photograph of the distant Neptune planet more detailed than that of the Hubble Space Telescope built specifically for the purpose of escape such atmospheric distortions.

The atmosphere distorts the appearance of things in space, causing the stars to twinkle and blur distant objects. "These results on UT4 with the AOF will help bring ELT engineers and scientists closer to implementing a similar adaptive optics technology on the 39-meter giant." The MUSE wide-field mode coupled to GALACSI in ground layer mode corrects the effects of atmospheric turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere up to one kilometer above the telescope over a wide field of view. The images are the result of the new adaptive optics mode on his GALACSI unit that works in tandem with a spectrograph instrument called MUSE on one of the telescopes

"But the new narrow field mode using laser tomography nearly corrects all atmospheric turbulence over the telescope to create much sharper images, but on a smaller area of ​​the sky. "

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