It rivals images from spacecraft in Earth orbit - as in Hubble or Webb. It won’t rival images from cameras sent to the near vicinity of the targets, but those can take decades from the moment you decide to take a picture to the time you take it, unless you already decided you’d take some pictures from that general location decades prior.
Still technically correct, the best kind of correct. I wonder how much cheaper are land-based telescopes over the lifetime of instruments such as the Hubble or the Webb.
Also, a huge shame the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope was cancelled. We need more creative names for those.
> I wonder how much cheaper are land-based telescopes over the lifetime of instruments such as the Hubble or the Webb.
10-100 times cheaper. An LBT night is around $50k-100k, which over 10 years corresponds to $300 millions. JWST total budget is about $10 billions.
True, JWST can operate close to 24/7. On the other hand, land-based telescopes are under constant refurbishment and upgrades, and they become more powerful over time.
Sure, but you're comparing apples and oranges. It's like comparing a sports car to a boat. A ground-based telescope can never do what the JWST can do, because of the atmosphere (namely, do IR photography).
It depends what the parameters for rivalry are .. a ground-based telescope can take multiple photo's, perhaps even thousands, at very low cost - although the resolution may not be comparable, this doesn't discount the value of the data to the scientists who are obtaining it at a far greater reduction of cost and effort than those who rely on space-based instruments. Remember, we don't have a permanent instrument stationed at Io - these spacecraft are doing fly-by's and thus have a limited window of opportunity.
So, while the resolution may be great eye-candy, the consistency of the data over time is vastly different. "Higher resolution" does not always mean "better science", especially if its a one-shot compared to thousands of data-samples...
I was quite taken by the ground-based photo but agree with you upon comparing the links. 50 mile resolution (LBT) vs. 1.6 miles (Galileo) is pretty cut-and-dried. Maybe the point is that LBT can do this for other objects not around Jupiter?
Exactly --- a fly-by of everything in the asteroid belt for example would be a budget-buster --- what is there in the belt which it would be interesting to have photos of?
My high score!! Or we could see which asteroid Han Solo is hiding the Millennium Falcon in. Or we could see all of the illegal mining operations by those pesky guys from Plural Zed Alpha Nine Nine.
We don't know what we won't see until we don't see it.
I agree; I'm thinking that's it's useful to be able to get frequent snapshots of the whole moon at this resolution (if you are interested in time lapse to track volcanic activity for instance). The satellite-based stitched photo probably took a long time to collect.
Also, without knowing details, I suspect you can improve the LBT images as the system matures, but as you say, probably not at the resolution the satellite provides.
Yes, the LBT could theoretically do 0.006 arcsecond resolution in binocular configuration (22.8 meter aperture), which is about 14 feet at Jupiter distance, or 10 times worse at best. But then it costs 10 times less, and can see the whole universe at that resolution.
Presumably you meant to say 14 miles, not 14 feet. Also, since the adaptive optic system acts on the near-IR light, let's shift the 500nm used to calculate the Rayleigh criterion to at least 1 micron, which doubles the limiting resolution to around 0.011 arcsec.
The Rayleigh criterion gives a limiting resolution assuming monochromatic light. The quoted 16 mas is a demonstrated resolution for a broadband filter. So, I was ballparking things and they have achieved an awesome result for a relatively short wavelength! That resolution is just achieved for the inner 1 arcsec of the image, though.
It's very exciting to be a (small) part of this, happy to answer any camera software questions (can't speak for the observatory's software though as I haven't seen it)
Are the cameras similar to what's in a consumer digital camera, that is, a single image sensor behind a bayer filer and a lens? Or does it use some other configuration, like an array of image sensors?
And does sensor readout work similarly to a consumer camera, sequentially reading out rows of sensor data? Is there any cool software processing during the capture, like decovolution?
> Are the cameras similar to what's in a consumer digital camera, that is, a single image sensor behind a bayer filer and a lens?
Yes they're quite similar to consumer camera sensors, our sensors are usually from high quality production bins. We advertise this quality as "scientific CMOS" (sCMOS) to help highlight this.
Consumer sensors can have a significant number of sensor defects which can be corrected so they aren't noticeable in casual photographs, but these defects are very detrimental for scientific imaging where quality is paramount.
Another big difference is the noise and quantum efficiency characteristics of the sensor which is another key requirement for scientific instruments.
We don't supply lens', I think the logic is that scientific customer's know exactly what kind of optical setup they want so most customer's would tend to use their own optical equipment or buy it in.
Our camera's are monochrome (scientific cameras tend to care more about raw resolution than having a smaller res with bayer layer) so customers typically use different color/wavelength filters to get what they want and process them into true color images later if needed.
> Or does it use some other configuration, like an array of image sensors?
This particular camera, the Zyla has just one sensor. Though it is a little unique in our portfolio, in that the sensor can be read out from both halves simultaneously in various patterns. If your interested in the hardware we provide lots of info in our hardware manual: https://andor.oxinst.com/downloads/uploads/Zyla_hardware_use...
I don't think we offer multi-sensor solutions, though I could be wrong.
> And does sensor readout work similarly to a consumer camera, sequentially reading out rows of sensor data?
Yes, there are two electronic shuttering modes we offer: rolling and global. Rolling takes a sequential row by row readout, and global does a readout of the entire sensor. The camera's used by the observator can only do rolling, but we have other Zyla models which also do global. There can be tradeoffs in choosing which one to use, typically framerate, noise and image distortion are the key factors in choosing.
Global is available on some high end consumer cameras, but generally most consumer sensors will do rolling. Though this may have changed since I last looked.
> Is there any cool software processing during the capture, like decovolution?
In the camera side of the company, we try to leave the image as clean and raw as possible.
We perform correction processing during acquisition on the camera; as high quality as the bins are, you still have to correct and characterize for various things to get the best performance in a scientific scenario.
In the applications side of the company we do all kinds of image processing: deconvolution (this is a big deal in the confocal microscopy world, we have our own patented deconvolution method: srrf-stream) https://fusion-benchtop-software-guide.scrollhelp.site/fusio..., AI analysis, 3d/4d imaging (https://imaris.oxinst.com/). Probably lots more I don't know about (I'm on the camera side).
Is this installed on one of the telescopes or integrated between both? I read about the LBT once and it seemed some instruments were on one and some were integrated. I assume it's used as a mono and binoc platform, depending.
I'm not quite sure about their exact optical setup, I know the Zyla's are used in the shark-vis instrument[0]. I would guess from their article that one Zyla is dedicated to adaptive optics and one for imaging.
> I assume it's used as a mono and binoc platform, depending.
Correct, it depends on the observation. Both sides have adaptive optics correction, but they work independently. This particular instrument (SHARK-VIS) is mounted on the "right" side, while SHARK-NIR is on the "left" side.
How does the "compensation for atmospheric turbulence" work? It honestly sounds impossible, like those tv shows where the detective "enhances" a blurry photo.
The replies already posted are quite good. Let me explain it a different way:
When light passes through the atmosphere, it undergoes a convolution known as a point spread function (think of it as convolving the signal with a 2D gaussian that spreads the intensity out to neighboring pixels). If we know that PSF specific details, we can deconvolve the image, either computationally, or by modifying the mirror in real time.
From my understanding, you can project a laser into the atmosphere, where it gets affected by the PSF. When you look at that laser projection, you can find the PSF (because you know the input shape of the laser, and what it looks like after being affected by the PSF), and therefore use that in real time to deconvolve the astronomic images you are collecting.
This process can be done so quickly it can adapt to immediate changes in the atmosphere (turbulence). "Enhance" is definitely a thing- it's widely used in both telescopes and microscopes (and if you had the right priors for a blurry photo, you could do it there too).
Sorry I'm not a big expert in the field of optics, but I am aware of our cameras being used to perform adaptive optics and lucky imaging.
Adaptive optics in particular requires very fast framerates and low latency to make rapid adjustments to the mirror's shape to compensate for the constantly changing atmosphere. It's really amazing that it's possible at all! I believe this is the method used here, though I can't say with certainty.
Lucky imaging is more akin to a brute force method, where you acquire lots and lots of images quickly and process the best ones when the atmosphere was being particularly cooperative at the time and not distorting the image very much.
Again, there are lots of experts out there on the topic, this is just my simple view into it.
It's a technological tour-de-force involving deformable mirrors that change shape every millisecond, cameras able to count every incoming photon, and special computers designed to calculate the next correction within microseconds. As usual wikipedia has an introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics
I visited the Large binocular telescope just a month or two ago. A very impressive facility, and one can only imagine the image quality if they were captured using both mirrors coherently.
If I'm doing my math correctly, Io covers about 0.06% as many degrees of our vision from Earth as the moon does. (I'm not good at this math, but I'm trying.)
The moon and Io are roughly the same diameter, so you can just divide Io's distance by the moon's distance to get the ratio of their perceived size without futzing with angles or geometry.
Could they use the high-res orbiter photos, and the lower-but-still-really-good ground-based photos and use some sort of AI algo to enhance the ground-based ones?
The idea being that they have high-res reference photos that are a one-shot deal but can take regular earth-based ones auto-enhance them from now on.
It could then show changes over time in high res?
I'm showing my limitations here, obviously, but I know what I mean... it makes sense in my head :)
But for what purpose would an AI generative assisted image actually do for science? This is an issue I have with the gung-ho AI crowd that thinks AI should be used for anything and everything all the time.
Even if you trained the model against the most detailed images available. That data was a mere snapshot of the exact time it was taken which in some cases is decades old. If things are actually changing on these bodies, then using that stale data to update current images would actually be damaging to science as it would be attempting to make the current look like the old. No! We need to see what it looks like now for the comparisons.
Enhance! It can only go so far. Otherwise, you're just a low-rent Hollywood SFX team generating new worlds for whatever space opera you weren't hired to work on.
Sure, super-resolution exists in various forms and this is one. But this is an example of not actually adding any scientific information to the photo: extraplating data like that will never yield anything new or unexpected, so...
The ever-changing surface of so many planets leads me to wish we had satellites in orbit around as much as possible. I'd love to read the "weather report" for Io or Titan!
I would expect that the James Webb telescope could create even better images of Io if they pointed it there? As long as it could focus range to look at nearby objects...
Expecting "better" from JWST compared to the image from TFA or even Hubble is definitely a misunderstanding of the differences between observation platforms. Just because the JWST mirror is larger than the Hubble's does not mean it will produce a "better" image as they are looking at different frequencies of light. Thinking that JWST will produce the same type of image with more detail/resolution is an incorrect way of thinking of the JWST's purpose.
I assume you're being downvoted for a bitcoin reference? It's interesting to know that you can rent the telescope for a meager ~70k usd. Maybe if I was a billionaire :).
Stitched spacecraft photo: https://science.nasa.gov/resource/high-resolution-global-vie...
This seems awesome but I would say 'rival those' is a bit of a stretch