Exoplanet Camera Now Online 47
The Bad Astronomer writes with news that the Gemini Planet Imager is officially online "The Gemini Planet Imager is a camera that is designed to take direct photos of exoplanets, alien worlds orbiting other stars. In a test run last November it spotted the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b, a dusty ring around a nearby star, and even snapped a portrait of Jupiter's moon Europa. Up to now, only about a dozen exoplanets have been directly imaged; GPI is expected to find dozens more in the next few years."
From the Gemini project: "'Even these early first-light images are almost a factor of 10 better than the previous generation of instruments. In one minute, we are seeing planets that used to take us an hour to detect,' says Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who led the team that built the instrument." The announcement has pictures.
Re:Oh! Sure.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh! Sure. They can take images of planets light years away, against the light pollution of the planet's sun, but somehow they don't have the resolving power to image the license plate on the lunar rover to silence the moon landing deniers.
They would just claim that the pics of the landing sites were photoshopped so why bother entertaining their delusion?