Thanks for that. The method by which they accomplished this is as important as the image itself:
18 February 2009
For Immediate Release
Hundred metre virtual telescope captures unique detailed colour image
A team of French astronomers has captured one of the sharpest colour images ever made. They observed the star T Leporis, which appears, on the sky, as small as a two-storey house on the Moon [1]. The image was taken with ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), emulating a virtual telescope about 100 metres across and reveals a spherical molecular shell around an aged star.
“This is one of the first images made using near-infrared interferometry,” says lead author Jean-Baptiste Le Bouquin. Interferometry is a technique that combines the light from several telescopes, resulting in a vision as sharp as that of a giant telescope with a diameter equal to the largest separation between the telescopes used. Achieving this requires the VLTI system components to be positioned to an accuracy of a fraction of a micrometre over about 100 metres and maintained so throughout the observations — a formidable technical challenge.
When doing interferometry, astronomers must often content themselves with fringes, the characteristic pattern of dark and bright lines produced when two beams of light combine, from which they can model the physical properties of the object studied. But, if an object is observed on several runs with different combinations and configurations of telescopes, it is possible to put these results together to reconstruct an image of the object. This is what has now been done with ESO’s VLTI, using the 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes.
http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2009/pr-06-09.html
Hopefully this will be a prelude to accomplishing the same thing at visible wavelengths.
Bob Clark
Space/Science » in reply to ESO's VLTI has the sharpest star picture ever: T Leporis
re: ESO's VLTI has the sharpest star picture ever: T Leporis
