Tech Shout!

A group of astronomers from Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), have been able to capture some of the ‘clearest’ pictures of space ever clicked.

These images have been taken with the help of a new ‘adaptive optics’ system dubbed ‘Lucky Imaging.’ The photographs were taken from an observatory on Mount Palomar, California over the past few months.

The pictures are two times sharper than those from Hubble Space Telescope.

Usually, images captured from Hobble are much better as compared to those taken from ground-based telescopes, since the earth’s atmosphere has a distorting effect. Interestingly, Lucky gets rid of this issue in two ways.

First and foremost it makes use of the most sensitive light-detection systems developed till now. This includes a chip that has very low electrical noise, enabling it to see much greater detail.

Secondly, the software system is able to determine as to when the atmospheric distortion starts and stops.

“The object is distorted by the haze most of the time,” he maintained, “but every now and again there are moments when the haze drops and you can see it very clearly.”

What the Lucky system does is that it gathers together all the clear pictures and throws out the distortions to bring out images that as per Dr Mackay are the “clearest ever images from the ground”.

“The images space telescopes produce are of extremely high quality but they are limited to the size of the telescope,” Dr Mackay continued.

“Our techniques can do very well when the telescope is bigger than Hubble and has intrinsically better resolution.”

Until now, there are two images that have been have been published. One, where the globular star cluster M13 is at a distance of 25,000 light-years. In this picture Stars that are as little as one light-day apart can be distinguished.

In the second picture, a very fine detail in the Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC6543) is shown.