Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Earth-Based Telescope Trying Hard, Still Taking Potato-Quality Photos

 


Astronomers and space journalists, huddle up:

We know you're *very* excited about the pictures you've taken of two of Jupiter's moons with an Earth-based telescope. We are too.  Just don't oversell it. These may be the "clearest yet" photos taken of these particular moons from Earth, but as far as clarity goes, they look like most of the photos I've taken of the Moon with my cell phone camera. Nothing to write home about.

I mean, keep working on the technology. Hopefully, Earth-based photos of distant celestial objects will continue to get better over time. Just don't expect the unwashed masses -- and this is coming from a life-long solar exploration nut who cut pictures of the Voyager encounters with Uranus out of the newspaper and pasted them into his journal and got WAY excited last year when he spotted two or three of Jupiter's moons through the eyepiece of his son's $120 telescope -- to get as excited about your potato photos as you are.

And don't tell me you can see any of Europa's famous surface cracks in this photo. Because all I can really see is pixels.

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