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.
Oh! Sure.... (Score:4, Funny)
Rude gestures from other worlds (Score:5, Funny)
One of the first pictures we snapped was of a totally unnecessary gesture from a very impolite world in the Andromeda region.
Re:RECEIVING MESSAGE...JUST A MOMENT (Score:5, Funny)
Burma Shave.
Re:Oh! Sure.... (Score:4, Funny)
Someone had convinced one of my co-irkers that the original Apollo 8 'Earthrise' image was Photoshopped (I'm **hoping** as a joke). He seemed surprised to hear that Photoshop didn't exist in 1968.