Saw the clearest photo of Jupiter's Great Red Spot at a planetarium in Ohio last month

I went to the Perkins Observatory near Delaware, Ohio and they had this new high-res composite from the Gemini Observatory. The storm looked like a giant swirling eye, way bigger than I expected. Has anyone else seen those new ground-based telescope images that rival Hubble?

3 comments

3 Comments

noahmartin1mo agoTop Commenter

Honestly, I think the hype around those ground-based images is overblown. The composite from Gemini might look crisp, but it doesn't capture the same true color or detail that Hubble's direct shots do, lol.

xenaf511mo ago

Have you seen that astronomer's blog @noahmartin about the adaptive optics on those images?

grace_campbell1mo ago

...and that's exactly the part nobody's talking about. The real trick with adaptive optics isn't just the sharpness, it's the timing of the corrections. @noahmartin's blog glosses over how the atmosphere changes faster than most systems can keep up. Even Gemini has to guess what the air is doing in between measurements. @xenaf51 might be onto something though - maybe the hype is about the algorithm, not the hardware. Those new deep learning models are filling in the gaps way better than older methods ever could. That's the actual game changer here.