Amazing ground based picture of Jupiter

Adaptive optics at the VLT. [Link]

Everyone loves twinkling stars and moonlit nights—EXCEPT astronomers. But astronomers are crafty people, so they've come up with ways to mitigate the distortion that Earth's thick atmosphere causes for ground based telescopes (from which stars appear to twinkle). And now, a new image-correction technique has delivered the sharpest whole-planet ground-based picture ever. The Very Large Telescope (VLT) performed a record two-hour observation of Jupiter using a breakthrough technique to remove atmospheric blur. And what a result! Just take a look at that gorgeous image…And this new image reveals changes in Jupiter's smog-like haze, probably in response to a planet-wide upheaval more than a year ago.

Being able to correct wide field images for atmospheric distortions has been the dream of scientists and engineers for decades. Astronomers used a new device called the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (MAD) prototype instrument mounted on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT)
The new images of Jupiter prove the value of the advanced technology used by MAD, which uses two or more guide stars instead of one as references to remove the blur caused by atmospheric turbulence over a field of view thirty times larger than existing techniques.

"This type of adaptive optics has a big advantage for looking at large objects, such as planets, star clusters or nebulae," says lead researcher Franck Marchis, from UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, USA. "While regular adaptive optics provides excellent correction in a small field of view, MAD provides good correction over a larger area of sky. And in fact, were it not for MAD, we would not have been able to perform these amazing observations."