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New telescope images of Jupiter's moon Io rival those from spacecraft
- jiggawatts 2y ago<moved>
- perihelions 2y agoWrong thread!
- whimsicalism 2y agoThe telescope photo: https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2024/glimpses-of-a-volcanic-1.jpg https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2024/glimpses-of-a-vol... Stitched spacecraft photo: https://science.nasa.gov/resource/high-resolution-global-view-of-io/ https://science.nasa.gov/resource/high-resolution-global-vie... This seems awesome but I would say 'rival those' is a bit of a stretch
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y agoI was quite taken by the ground-based photo but agree with you upon comparing the links. 50 mile resolution (LBT) vs. 1.6 miles (Galileo) is pretty cut-and-dried. Maybe the point is that LBT can do this for other objects not around Jupiter?
- WillAdams 2y agoExactly --- a fly-by of everything in the asteroid belt for example would be a budget-buster --- what is there in the belt which it would be interesting to have photos of?
- dylan604 2y agoMy high score!! Or we could see which asteroid Han Solo is hiding the Millennium Falcon in. Or we could see all of the illegal mining operations by those pesky guys from Plural Zed Alpha Nine Nine. We don't know what we won't see until we don't see it.
- max-ibel 2y agoI agree; I'm thinking that's it's useful to be able to get frequent snapshots of the whole moon at this resolution (if you are interested in time lapse to track volcanic activity for instance). The satellite-based stitched photo probably took a long time to collect. Also, without knowing details, I suspect you can improve the LBT images as the system matures, but as you say, probably not at the resolution the satellite provides.
- boffinAudio 2y agoIt depends what the parameters for rivalry are .. a ground-based telescope can take multiple photo's, perhaps even thousands, at very low cost - although the resolution may not be comparable, this doesn't discount the value of the data to the scientists who are obtaining it at a far greater reduction of cost and effort than those who rely on space-based instruments. Remember, we don't have a permanent instrument stationed at Io - these spacecraft are doing fly-by's and thus have a limited window of opportunity. So, while the resolution may be great eye-candy, the consistency of the data over time is vastly different. "Higher resolution" does not always mean "better science", especially if its a one-shot compared to thousands of data-samples...
- rbanffy 2y agoIt rivals images from spacecraft in Earth orbit - as in Hubble or Webb. It won’t rival images from cameras sent to the near vicinity of the targets, but those can take decades from the moment you decide to take a picture to the time you take it, unless you already decided you’d take some pictures from that general location decades prior.
- shiroiushi 2y ago>It rivals images from spacecraft in Earth orbit - as in Hubble or Webb. (emphasis mine) It seems like this critical detail was left out of the headline.
- rbanffy 2y agoStill technically correct, the best kind of correct. I wonder how much cheaper are land-based telescopes over the lifetime of instruments such as the Hubble or the Webb. Also, a huge shame the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope was cancelled. We need more creative names for those.
- kloch 2y agoAngular resolution through the Atmosphere has been solved with adaptive optics and advanced mathematical techniques. Unfortunately, nothing can remove the temperature of the atmosphere (which affects infrared imaging), or the absorption of many wavelength bands.
- alfiopuglisi 2y ago> I wonder how much cheaper are land-based telescopes over the lifetime of instruments such as the Hubble or the Webb. 10-100 times cheaper. An LBT night is around $50k-100k, which over 10 years corresponds to $300 millions. JWST total budget is about $10 billions. True, JWST can operate close to 24/7. On the other hand, land-based telescopes are under constant refurbishment and upgrades, and they become more powerful over time.
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- holoduke 2y agoThat telescope image is the current highest res. Not from the new telescope. That is yet to be released.
- petesergeant 2y agoAre you sure? The image is captioned: “Jupiter moon Io, imaged by SHARK-VIS on Jan. 10, 2024. This is the highest resolution image of Io ever obtained by an Earth-based telescope”
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wthomp 2y agoI visited the Large binocular telescope just a month or two ago. A very impressive facility, and one can only imagine the image quality if they were captured using both mirrors coherently.
- eternauta3k 2y agoFor those interested in the telescope, I highly recommend this Omega Tau episode: https://omegataupodcast.net/111-optical-astronomy-and-the-large-binocular-telescope/ https://omegataupodcast.net/111-optical-astronomy-and-the-la...
- dajHcjsid 2y ago[flagged]
- ggm 2y agoYou would think an article comparing images would.. well would show you the two images side-by-side. From the post(s) below It's impressive but its definitely lower res. Over the life of managing telescopes, is it actually cheaper than a craft in orbit?
- pulvinar 2y agoYes, the LBT could theoretically do 0.006 arcsecond resolution in binocular configuration (22.8 meter aperture), which is about 14 feet at Jupiter distance, or 10 times worse at best. But then it costs 10 times less, and can see the whole universe at that resolution.
- dakr 2y agoPresumably you meant to say 14 miles, not 14 feet. Also, since the adaptive optic system acts on the near-IR light, let's shift the 500nm used to calculate the Rayleigh criterion to at least 1 micron, which doubles the limiting resolution to around 0.011 arcsec.
- SiempreViernes 2y agoClose, 16 mas in R: https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/shark-vis/home https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/shark-vis/home
- dakr 2y agoThe Rayleigh criterion gives a limiting resolution assuming monochromatic light. The quoted 16 mas is a demonstrated resolution for a broadband filter. So, I was ballparking things and they have achieved an awesome result for a relatively short wavelength! That resolution is just achieved for the inner 1 arcsec of the image, though.
- pulvinar 2y agoYes, sorry, 14 miles (a wishful typo!)
- lokimedes 2y agoSomebody should make a cave painting of these worlds, you know, just in case…
- yayr 2y agowell, we've already buried all of github in the arktic, probably should do that with some llms as well
- CamperBob2 2y agoRod Serling beat us to it, I think: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734669/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734669/
- yayr 2y agoit looks like for around 1 BTC you could get one full night access to this amazing instrument :-) (you'll probably have to convert it to cash though before) https://www.lbto.org/lbt-access/ https://www.lbto.org/lbt-access/
- hifromwork 2y agoI assume you're being downvoted for a bitcoin reference? It's interesting to know that you can rent the telescope for a meager ~70k usd. Maybe if I was a billionaire :).
- ItsBob 2y agoCould they use the high-res orbiter photos, and the lower-but-still-really-good ground-based photos and use some sort of AI algo to enhance the ground-based ones? The idea being that they have high-res reference photos that are a one-shot deal but can take regular earth-based ones auto-enhance them from now on. It could then show changes over time in high res? I'm showing my limitations here, obviously, but I know what I mean... it makes sense in my head :)
- sandos 2y agoSure, super-resolution exists in various forms and this is one. But this is an example of not actually adding any scientific information to the photo: extraplating data like that will never yield anything new or unexpected, so...
- dylan604 2y agoBut for what purpose would an AI generative assisted image actually do for science? This is an issue I have with the gung-ho AI crowd that thinks AI should be used for anything and everything all the time. Even if you trained the model against the most detailed images available. That data was a mere snapshot of the exact time it was taken which in some cases is decades old. If things are actually changing on these bodies, then using that stale data to update current images would actually be damaging to science as it would be attempting to make the current look like the old. No! We need to see what it looks like now for the comparisons. Enhance! It can only go so far. Otherwise, you're just a low-rent Hollywood SFX team generating new worlds for whatever space opera you weren't hired to work on.
- SiempreViernes 2y agoAn Italian instrument apparently, built by the Rome observatory: https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/shark-vis/home https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/shark-vis/home
- ricksunny 2y agoSometimes (̶u̶s̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶?̶)̶ the tool is more interesting than the science it enables.
- bhouston 2y agoI would expect that the James Webb telescope could create even better images of Io if they pointed it there? As long as it could focus range to look at nearby objects...
- mikepurvis 2y agoIsn't JWST mostly about infrared though? That's the reason it has to be at L2, because those measurements are so much more sensitive to interference. These new Io images are in the visible spectrum, so it might be more apt to compare it to Hubble.
- BurningFrog 2y agoTrue, but infrared images should have value in addition to the visible light images.
- itishappy 2y agoSee for yourself: https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/07/27/james-webb-space-telescope-sees-jupiter-moons-in-a-new-light/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/07/27/james-webb-space-telesc...
- dylan604 2y agoExpecting "better" from JWST compared to the image from TFA or even Hubble is definitely a misunderstanding of the differences between observation platforms. Just because the JWST mirror is larger than the Hubble's does not mean it will produce a "better" image as they are looking at different frequencies of light. Thinking that JWST will produce the same type of image with more detail/resolution is an incorrect way of thinking of the JWST's purpose.
- VikingCoder 2y agoIf I'm doing my math correctly, Io covers about 0.06% as many degrees of our vision from Earth as the moon does. (I'm not good at this math, but I'm trying.) Io Diameter 2263.8 miles Jupiter Distance to Earth 444000000 miles Perp / Base 0.000005098648649 Radians 0.000005098648649 Degrees 0.0002922792219 Arc Seconds 1.052205199 === Moon Diameter 2159.1 miles Moon Distance to Earth 238900 miles Perp / Base 0.009037672666 Radians 0.009037426614 Degrees 0.5180690416 Arc Seconds 1865.04855
- IncreasePosts 2y agoThe moon and Io are roughly the same diameter, so you can just divide Io's distance by the moon's distance to get the ratio of their perceived size without futzing with angles or geometry.
- VikingCoder 2y agoGood point! With that shortcut, yeah, it's about 0.05% of the apparent diameter. So the math seems to check out.
- jcims 2y agoIO's diameter ~3600km Avg distance to earth ~628m km Apparent diameter is ~5 microradians or ~1 arcsecond Similar to imaging a marble 5mm in diameter from 1km away. Betelgeuse is ~1.2 billion km in diameter (for now, lol) It's 642 light years away. It's apparent diameter is .2 microradians, or approximately a red blood cell from 35m away. Space is big. Things are small.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- minimalc 2y agoI work for the company (Oxford Instruments Andor) that produces the cameras for this telescope: https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/shark-vis/instrument/detector-for-fast-imaging https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/shark-vis/instrument/detect... A great achievement! It's very exciting to be a (small) part of this, happy to answer any camera software questions (can't speak for the observatory's software though as I haven't seen it)
- hindsightbias 2y agoIs this installed on one of the telescopes or integrated between both? I read about the LBT once and it seemed some instruments were on one and some were integrated. I assume it's used as a mono and binoc platform, depending.
- minimalc 2y agoI'm not quite sure about their exact optical setup, I know the Zyla's are used in the shark-vis instrument[0]. I would guess from their article that one Zyla is dedicated to adaptive optics and one for imaging. [0] https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/shark-vis/instrument/detector-for-fast-imaging https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/shark-vis/instrument/detect...
- alfiopuglisi 2y ago> I assume it's used as a mono and binoc platform, depending. Correct, it depends on the observation. Both sides have adaptive optics correction, but they work independently. This particular instrument (SHARK-VIS) is mounted on the "right" side, while SHARK-NIR is on the "left" side.
- GrantMoyer 2y agoAwesome work! Are the cameras similar to what's in a consumer digital camera, that is, a single image sensor behind a bayer filer and a lens? Or does it use some other configuration, like an array of image sensors? And does sensor readout work similarly to a consumer camera, sequentially reading out rows of sensor data? Is there any cool software processing during the capture, like decovolution?
- bloopernova 2y agoThe ever-changing surface of so many planets leads me to wish we had satellites in orbit around as much as possible. I'd love to read the "weather report" for Io or Titan!