Astronomers at the University of Arizona, the Arcetri Observatory near Florence, Italy and the Carnegie Observatory have developed a new type of camera that allows scientists to take sharper images of the night sky than ever before.
The team has been developing this technology for more than 20 years at observatories in Arizona, most recently at the Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, and has now deployed the latest version of these cameras in the high desert of Chile at the Magellan 6.5-meter telescope.
"It was very exciting to see this new camera make the night sky look sharper than has ever before been possible," said UA astronomy professor Laird Close, the project's principal scientist. "We can, for the first time, make long-exposure images that resolve objects just 0.02 arcseconds across -- the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away. At that resolution, you could see a baseball diamond on the moon."
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