The NASA photo of the day for Thursday, May 7, 2015, shows a guy looking through a telescope, which doesnβt seem all that amazing, until you know the details.
University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close is using an eyepiece on the 6.5-meter Magellan Bade Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to observe the binary star Alpha Centauri.
Close and his team have spent the past decade crafting an adaptive-optics system for the telescope. At its heart is a deformable mirror, made by Italian colleagues at Arcetri Observatory in Florence, that compensates for the blurring effects of Earthβs atmosphere.
The result is an image at the βdiffraction limitβ of the huge telescope. Itβs the same view you would get from a space telescope, with no atmospheric blurring β except that no space telescope has a mirror this large.
Usually, this image would be recorded by a high-tech camera and viewed on a computer screen, but the team in Chile had just set up the system for this yearβs run and had not installed all the instruments.
They used an eyepiece for the first observations. As Steward Observatory astronomer Jared Males describes it on the groupβs blog: βWeβre pretty sure that this is the highest angular resolution image ever formed on a human retina.β
βDuring the night, 9 people looked through the eyepiece. These astronomers are the inaugural members of an exclusive club: βLβOrdine degli Astronomi al Limite di Diffrazioneβ (The Order of Astronomers at the Limit of Diffraction).β β