This Time Lapse Video of the Very Large Telescope At Work is the Coolest Thing You'll See Today

[n2doc]

By Clay Dillow
Posted 05.26.2011 at 5:29 pm


Your Universe (As Seen From the Home Planet) ESO/Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado

There’s very little we can write to preface the imagery below, so we’ll just set the scene and get out of the way. The video below was captured by Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile’s Atacama Desert. And it might make you cry.


What makes this time lapse particularly amazing--because we’ve all seen plenty of time lapse videos of the night sky--is the four telescopes in the foreground. Watching these instruments work against a black background would be endlessly fascinating on its own. Unfortunately you won’t be able to pay them too much attention. Because damn, what a sky.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFpeM3fxJoQ


Stunning. Looks 3-D in some shots.

[ixion]

1. Nice imagery. Could live without the metal soundtrack

[n2doc]

2. yeah, I ran it with the sound off n/t

[JitterbugPerfume]

3. you're right

that is pretty damn cool

[liberal N proud]

4. Tis COOL!

[annabanana]

5. wow! just wow . . .n/t

[Warpy]

6. Oh, neat, I love time lapse star shots

and seeing the southern hemisphere shots was especially nice.

[AlecBGreen]

7. cool!

is that orange laser what they use for adaptive optics? (i think thats the term) Its where they compensate for the fluctuations of the atmosphere. IIRC its been a huge breakthrough in ground-based observation and it basically makes satellites like Hubble unnecessary.

[knitter4democracy]

8. That was awesome! What's the yellow beam, though?

Is it a sight to keep it focused on one particular spot?

[Salviati]

9. It's probably used to calibrate adaptive optics.

They use a laser beam to excite sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere. The sodium acts as an artificial star, and by observing how the atmosphere distorts the image from the sodium atoms, they can figure out what the atmosphere is doing to the rays of light. Once they know what is being done, they can undo it, and remove a lot of the atmospheric distortion from the other images that they take.

[knitter4democracy]

10. Oh! That makes sense! Neat!

Thank you for this. I really couldn't figure out what it was.

[Esra Star]

11. Recommended....beautiful