ESO's very large telescope captures sharp images of Neptune

Astronomers from the Paranal 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 almost corrects all atmospheric turbulence over the telescope to create much sharper images, but on a smaller area of ​​the sky. "

Here is what the planet looked like without the l? adaptive optics.

These atoms serve as laser guide stars, and the light they bounce is used to measure atmospheric turbulence. This is extremely difficult to achieve in the visible and gives images comparable in sharpness to those of NASA / ESA's Hubble Space Telescope.

ESO said that the ability to take accurate images will allow astronomers to study the properties of astronomical objects.

With this new capacity, the 8 m telescope VLT reaches the theoretical limit of the sharpness of the image and is no longer limited by atmospheric blur. The new tool works by radiating four lasers into the sky that generate an intense orange light 30 centimeters in diameter. The right image is the narrow field mode view of MUSE when adaptive optics is enabled. Adaptive optics systems consist of three main components: a wavefront corrector to compensate for distortion, a wavefront sensor to measure distortion and a control system to calculate the correction required and the form to be applied to the corrector. (d, s, id) {
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