"Lucky" Camera Technology Blows Away Hubble

[Borodog]

A new camera technology has exceeded the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope from the ground, at tiny fraction of the cost, 50,000 times cheaper, in fact (in my opinion vindicating my position that the space telescope is a collosal boondoggle, but that's neither here nor there).

Deploying the new camera technology to larger ground based telescopes should produce even higher resolution images.

http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~optics/Luc...eases_0807.htm

The technology relies on a camera taking video through a telescope at 20 frames per second. Because of randomly changing atmospheric distortions, some of these images are clearer than others. The very clearest are sorted out and then "added" using special software to produce the extremely high resolution images.

[thylacine]

[ QUOTE ]
A new camera technology has exceeded the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope from the ground, at tiny fraction of the cost, 50,000 times cheaper, in fact (in my opinion vindicating my position that the space telescope is a collosal boondoggle, but that's neither here nor there).

Deploying the new camera technology to larger ground based telescopes should produce even higher resolution images.

http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~optics/Luc...eases_0807.htm

The technology relies on a camera taking video through a telescope at 20 frames per second. Because of randomly changing atmospheric distortions, some of these images are clearer than others. The very clearest are sorted out and then "added" using special software to produce the extremely high resolution images.

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This seems a bit like comparing a laptop now with a supercomputer from twenty years ago!

[teampursuit]

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(in my opinion vindicating my position that the space telescope is a collosal boondoggle, but that's neither here nor there).


[/ QUOTE ]

Does not follow. Yes, you can outresolve the Hubble (sometimes) now, but the Hubble was launched 17 years ago. You paid a premium for getting the data that much in advance. Also, the Hubble can image in wavelengths that can't be done (or only done poorly) from the ground.

[Stu Pidasso]

Didn't the advent of adaptive optics a few years back allow ground based telescopes to surpass hubble in many respects? In any event lets see what telescope provides better pictures on a cloudy day/night.

Stu

[teampursuit]

Yes, AO (and other techniques like those described in the article) have allowed ground-based systems to out-resolve the Hubble as long as the seeing wasn't too bad on a given night.

Your point about cloudy nights is a good one! And, lest we forget, unless an observatory is at the equator, it can't see the whole sky. The Hubble can.

That said, I don't think a multi-billion dollar mission to keep the Hubble going is worth the money *now*. The ground-based systems are almost as good at a fraction of the cost as the OP points out. Twenty years ago this was not the case.

[Bill Haywood]

Who is that screaming guy in your avatar?

[Arp220]

It outperforms Hubble in terms of spatial resolution, but not in terms of sensitivity (i.e. how faint you can see)

[epiLog]

Still a bit early but what do people think about the James Webb Space Telescope?

[BruceZ]

[ QUOTE ]
Who is that screaming guy in your avatar?

[/ QUOTE ]

That's "Ogre", one of the jocks from Revenge of the Nerds.

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
(in my opinion vindicating my position that the space telescope is a collosal boondoggle, but that's neither here nor there).


[/ QUOTE ]

Does not follow. Yes, you can outresolve the Hubble (sometimes) now, but the Hubble was launched 17 years ago. You paid a premium for getting the data that much in advance. Also, the Hubble can image in wavelengths that can't be done (or only done poorly) from the ground.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hubble was a gigantic boondoggle no matter how you slice it. By requiring that it be deployed by that other ridiculous boondoggle, the shuttle, HST was stuck in a decaying low earth orbit, necessitating that it be serviced by future shuttle flights, driving costs of launch and maintenence through the roof (not to mention [censored] up the main mirror). A fleet of cheap high orbit telescopes with a much wider range of imaging technologies would have cost a fraction as much and produced vastly more science.

HST is a piece of [censored], and the public has no idea the bill of goods they were sold because they were never told about the alternatives that NASA ditched to save that money pit of a shuttle program.