This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of apply.

A newly released epitome of the planet Neptune shows merely how far telescope engineering has come in recent years. This view of Neptune is almost impossibly clear compared with past attempts, thank you to a recent upgrade to the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. You lot can really make out cloud patterns on Neptune with the upgraded VLT, which is something even Hubble tin can't do.

You lot're probably thinking this image doesn't look all that clear. Indeed, there are crisper snapshots of the outermost planet, simply those came from NASA's Voyager ii during its 1989 flyby. There are no spacecraft in orbit of Neptune, so the only fashion to get new images of the gas giant is to capture them from 2.9 billion miles away on World.

Until now, Hubble was the all-time mode to await at Neptune, but the planet is rather pocket-sized and dim compared with nearly of the objects Hubble surveys. The comparison image below shows how much improve the new VLT is for observing objects similar Neptune compared with Hubble.

The paradigm of the planet Neptune captured with VLT and Hubble.

The Very Big Telescope consists of iv separate viii.2 meter (27 human foot) mirrors. That's a lot of surface area to scan the sky, but World's atmosphere distorts celestial objects. That's why space telescopes like Hubble and the upcoming James Webb are so of import. The ESO developed a new adaptive optics manner based on laser tomography to counteract that. The system consists of MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) and an optical unit of measurement called GALACSI.

Using adaptive optics with the VLT is similar giving it eyeglasses that correct for atmospheric distortion. In order to correct the blur, you need to know how much the atmosphere is distorting light. The VLT projects four high-intensity lasers into space, which human activity like an bogus star. The blur detected from the laser tells the organization how to change the mirror's shape to have sharper images. As you tin can run across beneath, Neptune is just a blurry deejay without adaptive optics.

Without adaptive optics, the VLT tin barely brand out Neptune.

The newly released images were taken in "narrow-field mode." That means the telescope tin merely observe a small part of the sky (like imaging Neptune). In broad-field mode, the VLT tin have capture more of the sky, just the organization can but right for a kilometer of atmospheric distortion.

The upgraded VLT won't be able to friction match the Webb Space Telescope, but it's already operational, and NASA's launch schedule for Webb keeps slipping.