High-Resolution Telescope Images Solve a Mystery About Jupiter's Great Red Spot (gemini.edu) 34
Researchers have collected some of the highest resolution images of Jupiter ever obtained from earth -- by combining images from Hawaii's Gemini North telescope with images from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Juno probe (currently orbiting Jupiter).
The images -- assembled from three years of observations -- "confirm that dark spots in the famous Great Red Spot are actually gaps in the cloud cover and not due to cloud color variations," explains an announcement from the Gemini Observatory. Gemini North's Near Infrared Imager (NIRI) allows astronomers to peer deep into Jupiter's mighty storms, since the longer wavelength infrared light can pass through the thin haze but is obscured by thicker clouds high in Jupiter's atmosphere. This creates a "jack-o-lantern"-like effect in the images where the warm, deep layers of Jupiter's atmosphere glow through gaps in the planet's thick cloud cover... A large number of very short exposure images are obtained and only the sharpest images, when the Earth's atmosphere is briefly stable, are used...
The ultra-sharp Gemini infrared images complement optical and ultraviolet observations by Hubble and radio observations by the Juno spacecraft to reveal new secrets about the giant planet... The detailed, multiwavelength imaging of Jupiter by Gemini and Hubble has, over the past three years, proven crucial to contextualizing the observations by the Juno orbiter, and to understanding Jupiter's wind patterns, atmospheric waves, and cyclones. The two telescopes, together with Juno, can observe Jupiter's atmosphere as a system of winds, gases, heat, and weather phenomena, providing coverage and insight much like the network of weather satellites meteorologists use to observe Earth.
The resolution was so high, the astronomer leading the observations says their telescope "could resolve the two headlights of a car in Miami, seen from New York City."
The images -- assembled from three years of observations -- "confirm that dark spots in the famous Great Red Spot are actually gaps in the cloud cover and not due to cloud color variations," explains an announcement from the Gemini Observatory. Gemini North's Near Infrared Imager (NIRI) allows astronomers to peer deep into Jupiter's mighty storms, since the longer wavelength infrared light can pass through the thin haze but is obscured by thicker clouds high in Jupiter's atmosphere. This creates a "jack-o-lantern"-like effect in the images where the warm, deep layers of Jupiter's atmosphere glow through gaps in the planet's thick cloud cover... A large number of very short exposure images are obtained and only the sharpest images, when the Earth's atmosphere is briefly stable, are used...
The ultra-sharp Gemini infrared images complement optical and ultraviolet observations by Hubble and radio observations by the Juno spacecraft to reveal new secrets about the giant planet... The detailed, multiwavelength imaging of Jupiter by Gemini and Hubble has, over the past three years, proven crucial to contextualizing the observations by the Juno orbiter, and to understanding Jupiter's wind patterns, atmospheric waves, and cyclones. The two telescopes, together with Juno, can observe Jupiter's atmosphere as a system of winds, gases, heat, and weather phenomena, providing coverage and insight much like the network of weather satellites meteorologists use to observe Earth.
The resolution was so high, the astronomer leading the observations says their telescope "could resolve the two headlights of a car in Miami, seen from New York City."
Re:Car headlights = stupid measurement (Score:5, Informative)
> Running purely on my engineering intuition: I'm not particularly impressed. I would surely hope that a serious interplanetary telescope could see a car a measly thousand miles away.
The limits of atmospheric seeing defy your intuition, then, I guess. A car is 2 meters wide. Miami to New York is 1700000 meters. The angular resolution we're talking about is thus roughly 0.25 arcseconds. Usually 0.4 arcseconds is the best seeing achieved at high altitude observatories (and only rarely), so achieving nearly double this through superresolution and combining observations is pretty OK.
Re:Car headlights = stupid measurement (Score:5, Informative)
> Running purely on my engineering intuition: I'm not particularly impressed. I would surely hope that a serious interplanetary telescope could see a car a measly thousand miles away.
The limits of atmospheric seeing defy your intuition, then, I guess. A car is 2 meters wide. Miami to New York is 1700000 meters. The angular resolution we're talking about is thus roughly 0.25 arcseconds. Usually 0.4 arcseconds is the best seeing achieved at high altitude observatories (and only rarely), so achieving nearly double this through superresolution and combining observations is pretty OK.
The actual article gives a resolution of 0.13 arcseconds (enough to not just resolve the car, but resolve its two headlights).
Re:Car headlights = stupid measurement (Score:5, Funny)
That's impossible, even for a computer!
It't not impossible. I used to resolve the neighbors using my Celestron back home, they're not much bigger than 2 meters.
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What is that even supposed to mean? If you're nontechnical, it doesn't help you, because you don't know how to compare that to Jupiter. If you are technical, it still doesn't help you, because calculating the resolution based on car headlights and turning that into something actually useful...no, I'm just not going to bother.
A technical user who actually bothers to read the article will find there the sentence "This corresponds to an angular resolution of the Gemini infrared “lucky imaging” observations down to 0.13 arc-seconds."
Re: Car headlights = stupid measurement (Score:2)
It is a bit of an understatement to talk about car headlights in Miami too, when the telescope is sharp enough to take this great pictures of Jupiter - which is much more awesome.
At least for me more useable comparison / yardstick would be other Earth (and Earth+Space) based observations. After reading TFA I still do not know how much this is better than before, even though it says: ...some of the highest resolution images of Jupiter ever obtained from the ground.
Lots of (great looking) fluff with less usef
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For a case of 2m wide car 1750km away you need a telescope with 0.23 arcseconds of resolution to separate out the two headlights, in which cas
Re: Car headlights = stupid measurement (Score:2)
Yes, I get that. I would have liked to know what are the resolutions of the next best images and so on, to have some sense what kind of advancement has been done there.
Here the resolution is 500km on Jupiter. What was it before - 1000km, 1500km and so on.
If this one is about two headlights in Miami, and the next one two headlights in Jacksonville it is rather confusing for a comparison...
Re:Car headlights = stupid measurement (Score:4, Funny)
What is that even supposed to mean?
Why, it means that NASA has confirmed that the Earth is flat! If the Earth was "round" a telescope in NYC could not see a car in Miami!
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What is that even supposed to mean?
Why, it means that NASA has confirmed that the Earth is flat! If the Earth was "round" a telescope in NYC could not see a car in Miami!
Well, it is Miami. So obviously the car was quite high at the time....
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Well, it is Miami. So obviously the car was quite high at the time....
So the headlights were extra big and easier to see?
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their telescope "could resolve the two headlights of a car in Miami, seen from New York City
That's just the New York department of revenue keeping an eye on all the retirees trying to hide their wealth in Florida.
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The Curious Case of NASA (Score:2, Offtopic)
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Voyagers were snapshots, one moment in time, at a medium resolution but which were better than anything up to that pont. Juno is there taking high resolution video clips of what is going on, Hubble and Gemini North are taking low res videos to fill in the gaps between Juno's passes. You really should check out the Juno imagery, it's stunning.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p... [nasa.gov]
Pick an image that catches your eye, and select View Image Feature link near the bottom of that page. The detail of some of them are
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They're doin it wrong (Score:4, Funny)
Jupiter's that way... [points up in the sky]
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Jupiter's that way... [points up in the sky]
Also, the guy is obviously a flat-Earther astronomer if he thinks he can see a car in Miami from New-York. Now, that's a strange astronomer.
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Plus. everyone knows that you can't see Miami from New York City anyway. As much as New York likes to think it's on top of the world, it's still at sea level, so it isn't nearly elevated enough to see around the curvature of the earth (or see over the tops of waves as they block the otherwise unobstructed view of Miami across our gloriously and uncontrovertibly flat earth).
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I wouldn't be surprised if all the gaz planets had a solid rocky core similar in size to the rocky planets. Maybe all planets form originally as gaz giants, and have their heavy atmosphere blown into space by the solar wind early after their formation, except those with strong magnetic fields (jupiter) or too far away (saturn, uranus, neptune).
Also, if jupiter does have a metallic hydrogen center, I wonder if this center is in the form of a solid metallic core or a thick liquid metallic ocean.
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Flat Earth Fodder (Score:2)
This is just fodder for flat Earthers to show how this proves the Earth is flat. They'd idiotically argue that if the Earth were round, you couldn't "resolve the two headlights of a car in Miami, seen from New York City."
Also, shouldn't they be called "disc Earthers" or "plane Earthers"? The Earth could be flat yet round like a circle.
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Were supposedly surrounded by very tall mountains in a circle, which the "globists" call Antarctica. Having just anyone visit there doesn't count, because they're likely to be under pay by NASA and will lie about it. So you need a real flat-earther to do the treck and the measurements.
2 meters? (Score:2)
I have seen womp rats smaller than this.