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*Palomar Observatory is an old favorite of mine. Of all observatories, it's the one I've most wanted to visit.
The laser was propagated as the first step in a program to expand the fraction of sky available to the technique known as adaptive optics. Adaptive optics allows astronomers to correct for the fuzzy images produced by earth's moving atmosphere, giving them a view that often surpasses those of smaller telescopes based in space.
Employing the laser will allow astronomers to place an artificial corrective guide star wherever they see fit. To do so, they shine a narrow sodium laser beam up through the atmosphere. At an altitude of about 60 miles, the laser beam makes a small amount of sodium gas glow. The reflected glow from the glowing gas serves as the artificial guide star for the adaptive-optics system.
*Says Palomar currently possesses the world's fastest adaptive optics system on the 200-inch Hale Telescope and can correct for atmospheric changes 2000 times per second.
Astronomers from Caltech, JPL, and Cornell University have exploited this system to discover brown dwarf companions to stars, study the weather on a moon of Saturn, and see the shapes of asteroids.
--Cindy :up:
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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This gives them a feed back loop to cancel out the airs disturbances that make the stars twinkle.
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