06 November 2014

A different perspective on the night sky


The time-lapse images of the night sky have been "stabilized" to show the stars in fixed positions and the earth rotating (not vice-versa, as our earth-based bias would suggest).

Via Reddit, where the thread includes brief comments on the lasers emitted from the observatories ("Basically, they use the laser to create an artificial star in the upper atmosphere. They then monitor its shape (which gets distorted due to turbulence in the atmosphere) and use that to correct the shape of the telescope's secondary mirror.")

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