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Prof. de Pater discusses planetary images obtained with adaptive optics

November 1, 2009

Imke_ao.s

After a duration of 10 years, the NSF Science and Technology Center for Adaptive Optics (CfAO), held its last official retreat at the UCLA Conference Center at Lake Arrowhead on 5-8 Nov. 2009. UC Berkeley Professor Imke de Pater gave a plenary talk on "10 years of planetary science" within the CfAO. She started by showing some of the earliest images, still plagued by artefacts (e.g., on Uranus), followed by more recent results obtained after the AO system had been optimized. A variety of objects within our Solar System are shown on the introductory slide: Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, Titan, Io and the triple asteroid systems Sylvia and Kleopatra.