Small, Ground-Based Telescope Images Three Exoplanets

ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2010) — Astronomers have snapped a picture of three planets orbiting a star beyond our own using a modest-sized telescope on the ground. The surprising feat was accomplished by a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using a small portion of the Palomar Observatory's Hale Telescope, north of San Diego.


The planets had been imaged previously by two of the world's biggest ground-based telescopes -- one of the two 10-meter (33-foot) telescopes of W.M. Keck Observatory and the 8.0-meter (26-foot) Gemini North Observatory, both on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The planets, which orbit the star HR 8799, were among the very first to be directly imaged, a discovery announced in Nov. of 2008.

The new image of the planets, taken in infrared light as before, was captured using just a 1.5-meter-diameter (4.9-foot) portion of the Hale telescope's mirror. The astronomy team took painstaking efforts to push current technology to the point where such a small mirror could be used. They combined two techniques -- adaptive optics and a coronagraph -- to minimize the glare from the star and reveal the dim glow of the much fainter planets.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100414144504.htm

Too late to rec now.
Yes, it is amazing.

:evilgrin:

:bounce: I tried to rec this tread, but it's already past the 24 hour mark. Oh well, here's a kick! :-)