Video from Palomar Observatory on LCROSS impact night

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

2009/10/10 04:47 CDT

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The Palomar Observatory adaptive optics image of the crater Cabeus remains the best I've seen from ground-based telescopes of the LCROSS impact site. They've now released a time-lapse video of 12 minutes' worth of observations, embedded below. Staring at the video, my eye desperately wants to make some sensible ejecta curtain structure out of the shifting dark gray pixel values in the black crater shadow. But any shifting pixel values in there are much more likely to be compression artifacts from the video conversion -- artifacts are most common near sharp boundaries between bright and dark things in the video, and what we're looking for is right at a sharp boundary between the bright mountain in the foreground and dark shadow in the background.