This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of use.

A newly released epitome of the planet Neptune shows just how far telescope technology has come in contempo years. This view of Neptune is almost impossibly clear compared with past attempts, cheers to a recent upgrade to the Very Big Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. You tin can really make out cloud patterns on Neptune with the upgraded VLT, which is something even Hubble tin can't do.

Yous're probably thinking this epitome doesn't look all that clear. Indeed, there are crisper snapshots of the outermost planet, but those came from NASA'due south Voyager 2 during its 1989 flyby. There are no spacecraft in orbit of Neptune, so the only way to get new images of the gas giant is to capture them from 2.9 billion miles away on World.

Until now, Hubble was the all-time way to look at Neptune, but the planet is rather pocket-size and dim compared with most of the objects Hubble surveys. The comparison epitome below shows how much amend the new VLT is for observing objects like Neptune compared with Hubble.

The image of the planet Neptune captured with VLT and Hubble.

The Very Large Telescope consists of iv split 8.2 meter (27 foot) mirrors. That's a lot of surface surface area to browse the heaven, but World'south atmosphere distorts celestial objects. That's why space telescopes like Hubble and the upcoming James Webb are and so of import. The ESO developed a new adaptive optics manner based on laser tomography to counteract that. The system consists of MUSE (Multi Unit of measurement Spectroscopic Explorer) and an optical unit called GALACSI.

Using adaptive optics with the VLT is similar giving information technology eyeglasses that right for atmospheric distortion. In order to correct the mistiness, you demand to know how much the atmosphere is distorting lite. The VLT projects iv high-intensity lasers into infinite, which act like an bogus star. The blur detected from the laser tells the system how to modify the mirror's shape to take sharper images. As you lot can see below, Neptune is only a blurry deejay without adaptive optics.

Without adaptive optics, the VLT can barely make out Neptune.

The newly released images were taken in "narrow-field mode." That ways the telescope can only notice a small-scale part of the sky (like imaging Neptune). In wide-field mode, the VLT can take capture more than of the heaven, but the organization can only correct for a kilometer of atmospheric distortion.

The upgraded VLT won't exist able to match the Webb Space Telescope, but it'southward already operational, and NASA's launch schedule for Webb keeps slipping.