We have one laser run a month, around the full moon... a run is usually 2-3 nights in a row, or last one was last week... each of our last 3 runs have yielded something never seen before... one of which was a nebula that cannot be imaged by earthbound telescopes with adaptive optics... the best picture of it had been a Hubble picture... our picture had about 2-3 times the resolution of the hubble picture. It is breathtaking...

We took images of the galactic center that are the best ever taken.... incredible resolution! We even got a short movie of something falling into the central black hole...

I WILL share the pictures with the board as soon as they are officially released - I promise... but there are papers and press releases planned for those results, so they are embargoed until they are officially presented...

The cool thing is the Laser guide star is officially in its 'engineering phase'- in other words when we have a laser run the goal isnt to get cool pictures but to just quantify and improve the systems performance... in 2005 we start using it for science- we will have FAR more many laser runs...

without a laser only ~1% of the sky can be viewed with adaptive optics... with it ~80% of the sky can be observed- nearly a 2 orders of magnitude increase in objects to study...

Gemini North will be getting a laser within the year, Subaru scope will be getting one soon (both on Mauna Kea). The laser guide star is the biggest thing to happen to astronomy since adaptive optics... think about the wonders adaptive optics have revealed, then think about an eighty fold increase...

The effort that has gone into making this project work has been IMMENSE... I have only been in on it the past 2 years, and trust me- it has been a hell of a lot of work by many people- but now it is looking like it was worth it...

this is a picture released about a year ago- our first science picture with the laser:

The top star looks odd because there is a thick dust and gas disk around it- planets being born.... you can only see the light reflecting off of the dust that will form a solar system... the other star may have already formed planets- bigger scopes in the future will know....