New Type of Camera Takes Sharpest Pictures of Night Sky Ever

An international team of researchers have developed a new type of camera capable of taking images so sharp it could detect a baseball diamond on the Moon.

The new technology includes a telescope mirror that vibrates 1,000 times each second in order to counteract atmospheric flickering, thus yielding the sharpest images of the night sky in visible light ever taken.

Led by researchers from the University of Arizona, the Arcetri Observatory in Italy and the Carnegie Observatory, the device has been some 20 years in the making.

"It was very exciting to see this new camera make the night sky look sharper than has ever before been possible," UA astronomy professor Laird Close, the project's principal scientist, said in a statement. "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."

According to the researchers, the twofold improvement over previous efforts is the result of using a telescope with a large diameter primary mirror for digital photography at its theoretical resolution limit in visible wavelengths.

"As we move towards shorter wavelengths, image sharpness improves," NASA Sagan Fellow at UA's department of astronomy Jared Males said. "Until now, large telescopes could make the theoretically sharpest photos only in infrared -- or long wavelength -- light, but our new camera can take photos that are twice as sharp in the visible light spectrum."

The achievement puts the Hubble Space Telescope, previously the leader in visible-light imaging, squarely in second place through the help of a 21-foot diameter mirror, compared to Hubble's 8-foot mirror.

In order to combat atmospheric turbulence, which has long plagued earth-based telescopes, the team developed an adaptive optics system called MagAO. It includes a thin curved glass mirror on a magnetic field 30 feet above the telescope's primary mirror that can change its shape at 585 points on its surface 1,000 times each second.

"As a result, we can see the visible sky more clearly than ever before," Close said. "It's almost like having a telescope with a 21-foot mirror in space."

Already the new system is paving the way for important scientific discoveries, including the first time scientists have been able to detect a distance between the known binary system Theta 1 Ori C located in the Orion nebula.

"I have been imaging Theta 1 Ori C for more than 20 years and never could directly see that it was in fact two stars," Close said. "But as soon as we turned on the MagAO system it was beautifully split into two stars."