Well, actually ANOTHER 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. Today is one of my days and myself and a couple of my students talk about adaptive optics technology.
Adaptive optics is a collection of technologies we use to overcome the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere. By measuring how Earth's atmosphere is distorting images, we can correct the images and end up with images from ground based telescopes that are nearly as good as those from the Hubble Space Telescope (and soon we will surpass Hubble image quality).
Adaptive optics is critical to systems such as the Boeing Airborn Laser Testbed which recently successfully shot down a missile in a test. A major plot of my podcast is about an alien attack on Earth and how adaptive optics plays a role in the battle.
And in terms of peaceful, non-astronomy related applications, adaptive optics is being used in medical applications, particularly vision. Adaptive optics technologies play a role in measuring vision defects, LASIK, and retinal imaging.
Adaptive Optics: It's not just for astronomers!
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6 comments:
Aye, Aye, captain, um.. ensign, um... narrator. Thanks for sharing!
I am just waiting for some military person to chime in with all the military stuff I got wrong (just like I do when I see bad science!)
HELL NO...don’t shoot down the aliens, unless the are coming across the border!
Boppster...I thought the Hubble Scope is suppose to be the greatest thing since toilet paper. So now, you are telling me we can see clearer images from earth then from outer space? I would love to have the money spent on Hubble! I could retire in comfort, big time comfort.
You got the gist of it, Ser, but a couple of things to remember. We couldn't do this well from the ground back when Hubble was launched in 1990, so we did get a good amount of data from it before ground based astronomy with AO started to catch up.
Second, the Hubble can still observe some wavelengths of ultraviolet light that is absorbed by our atmosphere so we can't do see anything from the ground. Hubble does some near infrared astronomy as well that we can do from the ground, but Hubble still does better.
That's good stuff, hale, but how about "Adaptive Sound," or something similar, to filter out the noise of urban life? It'd be great to turn on a device and not have to hear boom cars, motorcycles with straight pipes, gunshots, etc.
How about mandatory adaptive optics on all mirrors? We can all be assured that we look better and are more slim than what we really are.
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