Virtual Babelsberg Starry Night
Neptune from the VLT with MUSE/GALACSI Narrow Field Mode adaptive optics.
Credit: AIP/P. WeilbacherMarch 16, 2021 // The next lecture of the virtual Babelsberg Starry Nights of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) will be broadcasted starting on Thursday, 18 March 2021 on the YouTube channel "Urknall, Weltall und das Leben". Please note that the lecture will be given in German.
From 6 p.m. on Thursday, Dr. Tanya Urrutia’s lecture on the topic "Neptune: Super Sharp Pictures from the Edge of our Solar System" from the Babelsberg Starry Night series will be available online under this link. The lecture will be held in German.
In summer 2018, a new mode of the MUSE instrument in Chile captured the sharpest image of Neptune since 1989, when the Voyager 2 probe visited the gas giant. In the lecture, Dr Tanya Urrutia will use the image to introduce the principles of adaptive optics. Turbulence in the atmosphere makes astronomical images look blurry. With the technique of adaptive optics, in which extremely powerful lasers are shot into the sky, researchers can remove these turbulence effects and thus produce very sharp images. Scientific applications using this new method will also be presented.
This season, the Babelsberg Starry Nights will not take place on site at the AIP, but will come straight to your home: on the 3rd Thursday of each month from 6 p.m. the lectures are available at
https://www.aip.de/babelsberger-sternennaechte
and on the Youtube channel of Urknall, Weltall und das Leben and can be viewed at any time afterwards.
Images
Neptune from the VLT with MUSE/GALACSI Narrow Field Mode adaptive optics.
Big screen size [1000 x 1031, 20 KB]
Original size [1208 x 1246, 40 KB]
