Neptune is 2.9 billion miles away from Earth and the only better pictures that many of us remember seeing is when the Voyager 2 flew by the planet back in 1989.
There isn’t any spacecraft orbiting Neptune clearly but the latest images of the distant planet show incredible detail. It’s interesting to note that these images have been captured using special telescopes right here on Earth.
This images with incredible detail were made possible after an upgrade to the aptly named Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. The images are as detailed as the ones taken by the Hubble, which for those who are unaware is a big telescope that orbits the Earth and looks far out in space.
The Very Large Telescope has four telescopes with 8.2 meter mirrors placed in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. The images are the result of the new adaptive optics mode on its GALACSI unit which works in tandem with a spectrograph instrument called MUSE on one of the telescopes.
The result speaks for itself, allowing us to see Neptune clearly than we have ever been able to before. The instruments used in this endeavor will continue to be improved to further improve the resolution and clarity of the images. One can only imagine just how clearly we will be able to see such distant objects in space then.
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