Magellan II's Adaptive Optics Top Hubble's Resolution 136
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."
Oh, wow. What you learn when you RTFA... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not entirely fair comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Still can't handle proper units? (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole point of using Imperial units is that we don't want to throw out trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure to make the Europeans happy. Seriously, spend a year in the US with our measures and spend a year somewhere that uses metric measures; metric isn't any easier for any thing you're likely to be doing on a day to day basis. Unless of course you're a scientist or engineer.