One of the beautiful things about living in this day and age is the incredible imagery of outer space that technology allows us to capture. Yesterday, astronomers shared a remarkable new image of Jupiter that was captured in infrared by the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii.
The image shows the glowing regions of warmth that lurk beneath he gas giant’s cloud tops, and is said to be one of the sharpest observations of the planet ever made from the ground. To achieve the resolution, scientists used a technique called “lucky imaging” which scrubs out the blurring effect of looking through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere.
This method involves acquiring multiple exposures of the target and only keeping those segments of an image where that turbulence is at a minimum. When all the “lucky shots” are put together in a mosaic, a clarity emerges that’s beyond just the single exposure.
The sharp image they put together is especially amazing when you consider the fact that Jupiter is 11 times wider than Earth and 300 times more massive.
