What kind of alien god is looking on from deep space in the upper right? I see two eyes, a mouth, and the dark shading varies just enough to look vaguely like a head.
I’m starting to think maybe I’ve had a few too many arguments intense discussions with alien conspiracy theorists…
So ground based observatories have long benefited from the development of adaptive optics. That's basically where you have a small mirror that is synced to the movements of the upper atmosphere and essentially cancels out the shimmer that makes stars twinkle to the naked eye, bringing them into a sharp focus more like what you would get from a space telescope. But the tech can only achieve this feat over narrow patches sky, meaning wide field observatories were left out. I think that's what they're talking about here? You can't get much more wide field than Vera Rubin.
I believe this is a new deconvolution image stacking algorithm that can easily be run in hardware. It should work with any observatory. The math is far enough above my head that I can’t be sure though.
It would be cool if this makes it into software that people could use at home. I would love to see what amateur astrophotographers could to with it.
Hopefully, this new algorithm is not overly taxing. The amount of processing they’ll have to do to keep up with Rubin must be staggering. It’s got what, a 3.2 Gpixel camera mapping the entire night sky every few days. And then all that data has to be processed across the timeline of past observations. I wouldn’t be surprised if the computational demands are what kept it from becoming a reality until now.
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