This project involved images of Titan, Neptune, and Uranus obtained using the 10-meter W.M. Keck I1 Telescope and its adaptive optics system. An adaptive optics system corrects for turbulence in the Earths atmosphere by sampling the wavefront and applying a correction based on the distortion measured for a known source within the same isoplanatic patch as the science target (for example, a point source such as a star). Adaptive optics can achieve a 10-fold increase in resolution over that obtained by images without adaptive optics (for example, Saturns largest moon Titan is unresolved without adaptive optics but at least 10 resolution elements can be obtained across the disk in Keck adaptive optics images).
展开▼
