A new type of camera snaps the sharpest images of the night sky than ever before, achieving image resolution that could see a baseball diamond on the Moon, astronomers say.
The camera system uses a telescope mirror that vibrates a thousand times each second to counteract atmospheric flickering, researchers said.
Astronomers at the University of Arizona (UA), the Arcetri Observatory near Florence, Italy and the Carnegie Observatory have been developing this technology for more than 20 years now and they have deployed the latest version of these cameras in the high desert of Chile at the Magellan 6.5-metre telescope. “It was very exciting to see this new camera make the night sky look sharper than has ever before been possible,” said UA astronomy professor Laird Close, the project’s scientist. “We can, for the first time, make long-exposure images that resolve objects just 0.02 arcseconds across, the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away. At that resolution, you could see a baseball diamond on the Moon,” said Close.