For reference, the field of view here is about 2.5x the diameter of the Earth. Astronomical scales remain mind bending to me.
The paper has more details. What's interesting to me is that the key innovation isn't the deformable mirror but rather the design of a wavefront sensor that focuses on coronal features (instead of the "grain" on the solar surface prior systems used).
It's almost nice that mysteries remain - apparently, the physical mechanism behind solar spicules [1] remains "hotly" (!!) debated.
Adaptive optics started in a secret space weaponry research funded by SDI.
When a few profs independently proposed the idea in their NSF research grant proposal they were told - we already know this stuff.
https://www.npr.org/2013/06/24/190986008/for-sharpest-views-...
tomrod•8mo ago
tsujamin•8mo ago
itishappy•8mo ago
There's a billion WWII ending atom bombs going off every day up there. How are we still ok?
lazide•8mo ago
Distance/dilution really is the solution eh? Besides, without all those fusion bombs going off our air would be liquid/solid, which is extremely inconvenient.
wffurr•8mo ago
jajko•8mo ago
doctorwho42•8mo ago
layer8•8mo ago
tomrod•8mo ago
amelius•8mo ago
srean•8mo ago
stevenwoo•8mo ago
GolfPopper•8mo ago
I caught some of that sense not too long ago, looking at the Moon with a new-to-me (amateur) telescope and wide-field eyepiece. Some combination of the seeing conditions and optics let my mind really connect with what I was seeing, in a way it never had before in decades of amateur astronomy. I understood that what I was looking at - grokked it, if you will allow - across an abyss that was incomprehensibly vast to me, but still only the tiniest of distances of the scale of the solar system, let alone the universe, was a whole other world, a vast globe of rock and dust, moving through the void, its mountains and valleys utterly empty of the air, water life that has always surrounded me.
My description doesn't really do it justice. It was the first time I'd ever really gotten a sense for the scales involved in my hobby, where what I was looking at felt real and not just an image through an eyepice and it made me catch my breath. Amazing, disturbing, and a little frightening all at once.
jvanderbot•8mo ago
It was so, so visible and yet so, so far. Somehow using all that power to see it in real time and still have it be small but look so insanely huge somehow.
I had this vertigo and the scale of the solar system kind of rushed at me. Just like you say.
ChuckMcM•8mo ago
doctorwho42•8mo ago