National Geographic:
Astronomers have put a high-tech spin on an old technique known as "lucky imaging" to capture some of the sharpest ever shots of galaxies, stars, and nebulas.
The new pictures were taken using a ground-based camera at Palomar Observatory in California—at a cost of just 50 thousandth that of images from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, say researchers from the University of Cambridge in England and the California Institute of Technology.
Previous Palomar snapshots of the Cat's Eye Nebula, the planetary nebula seen above, were about ten times less detailed than Hubble's pictures (left). But after using the lucky imaging process, that resolution increased twentyfold, allowing the experts to pick out details separated by distances of only a few light-hours."To produce images sharper than Hubble from the ground is a remarkable achievement by anyone's standards," research leader Craig Mackay of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy said in a statement.
"The low cost means that we could apply the process to telescopes all over the world."
There are two key effects of this new technology:
- Pushing the boundaries of the what is physically feasible.
- Reducing the economic cost of taking high-quality photos in space. If this article is correct, the cost has dropped enough to make this a near-ubiquitous tool for astronomical research.
I wonder how long until some form of this technology is available to hobbyists with a motorized telescope, a digital camera, and laptop computer?
Read the University of Cambridge press release and more on this on Tom's Astronomy Blog.
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