Staring into the night sky just got sharper with new camera

Ever wondered what's out there in the night sky? Well, thanks to a team of astronomers, they have created a new type of camera that will now give us closer encounters of the starry kind.

It may have taken 20 years to getting round to inventing something that can take photos of space twice as sharp as the Hubble Telescope, but these astronomers are pretty sharp when it comes to camera-technology.

What they have done is invented a razor thin curved glass mirror that is capable of counteracting the blurring created by atmospheric turbulence by changing its shape at 585 different points. Sitting just above the telescope's primary mirror, it has produced some stunning results.


{via National Geographic }

Now they can look into the night sky with sharper focus and take extraordinary pictures - with the boast that they could see a baseball on the moon. Now that's some going.

The work has been achieved by the astronomers at the University of Arizona, the Carnegie Observatory, and the Arcetri Observatory near Florence, Italy. The innovation is now located in the latest version of cameras at the Magellan 6.5 meter telescope in Chile.

Astronomy professor and Laird Close, the project's principal scientist. "We can, for the first time, make long-exposure images that resolve objects just 0.02 arcseconds across – the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away.
"It was very exciting to see this new camera make the night sky look sharper than has ever before been possible. It's almost like having a telescope with a 21-foot mirror in space."


{via National Geographic }
The camera has already produced amazing results of the Theta 1 Ori C binary star system. Two stars were found so close together—the distance from Earth to Uranus—that previous cameras haven't been able to see the separation.
Said Jared Males, a NASA Sagan Fellow at the University of Arizona's department of astronomy. "Until now, large telescopes could make the theoretically sharpest photos only in infrared – or long wavelength – light, but our new camera can take photos that are twice as sharp in the visible light spectrum."
The results have been published in three scientific papers in the Astrophysical Journal. One of the mysteries solved, thanks to the cameras, is how planets form from dust and gas.
So when you do look to the heavens, you never what might be out there. Cameras from other plants might be focused on you!

I'd love to see how this looked coming out of the camera