Staring into the Kepler Field
When two friends and I first arrived at the summit of Mauna Kea last night, we stopped at the summit ridge by Gemini. I stepped out of the truck and saw a laser shooting from Keck above us and into the Milky Way. Overcome with excitement, we jumped back into the vehicle and raced over to Keck to get a better angle.
As soon as we got there, I realized the laser was pointed into the region of the sky known as the Kepler field. NASA's Kepler spacecraft has been watching that area since 2009 in search of planets orbiting other stars. The spacecraft has detected thousands of exoplanet candidates, but ground-based telescopes are necessary to perform follow-up observations and check for false detections. Keck is using its laser in order to track the turbulence in the atmosphere, and it cancels out the blurring effects of the turbulence in real-time by warping the telescope mirror hundreds of times per second. The end result is much sharper, more detailed images.
Staring into the Kepler Field
When two friends and I first arrived at the summit of Mauna Kea last night, we stopped at the summit ridge by Gemini. I stepped out of the truck and saw a laser shooting from Keck above us and into the Milky Way. Overcome with excitement, we jumped back into the vehicle and raced over to Keck to get a better angle.
As soon as we got there, I realized the laser was pointed into the region of the sky known as the Kepler field. NASA's Kepler spacecraft has been watching that area since 2009 in search of planets orbiting other stars. The spacecraft has detected thousands of exoplanet candidates, but ground-based telescopes are necessary to perform follow-up observations and check for false detections. Keck is using its laser in order to track the turbulence in the atmosphere, and it cancels out the blurring effects of the turbulence in real-time by warping the telescope mirror hundreds of times per second. The end result is much sharper, more detailed images.