Gemini Planet Imager |
Gemini Planet Imager |
Jan 7 2014, 07:36 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 241 Joined: 16-May 06 From: Geneva, Switzerland Member No.: 773 |
First pictures of the Gemini Planet Imager :
-Beta Pictoris b, a planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris -A disk of dust orbiting the young star HR4796A -Europa http://www.gemini.edu/node/12113 These images are incredible !! “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. I can't wait to see more !! Regards, Marc. |
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Jan 7 2014, 08:22 PM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1582 Joined: 14-October 05 From: Vermont Member No.: 530 |
That is incredible, and the mention of using it to image clouds on Titan is a nice tease, too.
Homepage for the instrument appears to be here: http://www.gemini.edu/?q=node/11549 Can't say I understand a lot of the instrument terms, but it sure sounds like pushing adaptive optics into the coronagraph, which is neat. Also interesting is that this ball started rolling in 2005: http://www.adaptiveoptics.org/News_0805_1.html |
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Jan 11 2014, 10:11 PM
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#3
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Member Group: Members Posts: 796 Joined: 27-February 08 From: Heart of Europe Member No.: 4057 |
Most of the modern big telescopes with Adaptive optics (AO) have some coronograph, but GPI and similar instruments are special.
Thanks to use of so called extreme AO they can use coronographs in much more efficient way. Two such instruments are working now - new GPI and older Project 1640 on the Palomar's 5-meter telescope. Third, SPHERE (ESO), expects first light at the end of this year. All of these instruments can ordinarily image planets which are 1,000,000-10,000,000× less bright than the nearby star (in older instruments this factor was/is 10,000-100,000×). -------------------- |
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Jan 14 2014, 03:04 PM
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#4
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Member Group: Members Posts: 495 Joined: 12-February 12 Member No.: 6336 |
Yes this is outstanding, I remember a time not so far back when "knowledgeable" people claimed anything like this would be impossible to achieve with telescopes on Earth. I noted they talked about "observations that could help in following surface alterations on icy satellites of Jupiter" while showing one image of Europa it seem to be a hint of a possibility discussed in another thread of this forum.
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Aug 21 2014, 11:04 PM
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#5
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Member Group: Members Posts: 315 Joined: 1-October 06 Member No.: 1206 |
An interesting presentation by David Vega during the NSF REU student presentation sessions at the SETI Institute recently included some test images taken by the GPI, including a rather impressive image of Pallas.
The presentation is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxYL6r61FZk...TVT_chwgDcau4sg Relevant image is at 16:50 P |
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Aug 22 2014, 04:01 AM
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#6
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Solar System Cartographer Group: Members Posts: 10146 Joined: 5-April 05 From: Canada Member No.: 227 |
Wow! That's quite an image - let's hope we see it applied to Pluto and Ceres soon, while it is still useful to do so.
Phil -------------------- ... because the Solar System ain't gonna map itself.
Also to be found posting similar content on https://mastodon.social/@PhilStooke NOTE: everything created by me which I post on UMSF is considered to be in the public domain (NOT CC, public domain) |
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