[X] My Assistant

[Rakhir]

'Clearest' images taken of space
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6975961.stm

A team of astronomers from the US and the UK has obtained some of the clearest pictures of space ever taken.

[Del Palmer]

The Lyot Project coronagraph to be installed at Palomar:

http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/news/lyotNews.cfm

[tedstryk]

Speaking of great ground based images, check out this one - http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071206.html

This is really impressive given that the planet was only 13.9 arc seconds across at the time. You can actually see the shadows of the volcanoes in Elysium thanks to the relatively high phase angle.

[ugordan]

You can actually see the shadows of the volcanoes in Elysium thanks to the relatively high phase angle.

I'm always wary of details in these kinds of images. Not to belittle the great achievements of amateur astronomers out there (and they are great, pulling off stuff only professional astronomers could have dreamed about a couple of decades ago), but the stacking process in which these images are created and unsharpening and other filters usually gives a ringing effect around sharper features. These could be mistakenly identified as real features, though some can undoubtedly turn out to be real features. Most of the time when I see such groundbased images I'm reminded of the unsharp filter.

I guess it's easy to fall into the trap of overprocessing source data because it often gives aesthetically more pleasing results. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't trust the smallest scale details visible to be very real.

[tedstryk]

These aren't amateurs. Pic du Midi has long been at the forefront of planetary astronomy. http://bagn.obs-mip.fr/ http://www.imcce.fr/page.php?nav=fr/observ...x.php/mars.html http://www.ias.u-psud.fr/www/tpl2page.php?pageID=271 They are the leading French observatory that is actually in France.

TomaB, I have marked what I am talking about below.