September 27, 2012 - Popular Science
This blurry image of Pluto and Charon may not seem that impressive at first glance, but consider this: The resolution here is equivalent to separating a pair of car headlights in Providence, Rhode Island, from a viewing spot in San Francisco. This is the clearest image ever taken in visible light of our favorite dwarf planet and its largest companion.
Scientists using the Gemini Observatory used the “speckle method” to obtain this image, which involves taking a lot of snapshots and then stitching them together. Each picture was a 60 millisecond exposure, or about 1/20th of a second. Instead of using adaptive optics to cancel out Earth’s atmospheric turbulence and other artifacts, the speckle method combines the light from each object in each picture, which remains constant.
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