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Simulated Large Binocular Telescope Images
Jupiter's Moon Io
The simulated image to the left was created by E. K. Hege and J. R. P. Angel as an example of the kind of image LBT would
make of a familiar object. Their starting point was a Galileo spacecraft image of Jupiter's moon Io taken in visible light.
Io is one of Jupiter's Galilean moons and has more volcanoes than any other world.
The upper image "a" is a simulated LBT image created by convolving the spacecraft image with the LBT point spread function.
This image corresponds to a single LBT exposure. The resolution was modeled for wavelengths of 0.8, 1.25 and 1.65 microns in
the near-infrared (displayed here as blue, green and red). Because of the binocular aperture of LBT, this image is sharper
in the left-right direction (resolution corresponding to 22.8 m baseline) than in the top-bottom direction (resolution
corresponding to 8.4 m baseline). The point spread function (PSF) of LBT can be seen in the image at the right of this page
created by Serge Corriea of Arcetri Observatory. The PSF can also be seen in the simulated star image just to the lower left
of Io's disk. These images assume that the LBT adaptive optics system is correcting the blurring caused by turbulence in
Earth's atmosphere.
By taking several such images through a night, the astronomer can deconvolve the images to recover the image quality of a
22.8 m circular aperture. This resolution is demonstrated by the "b" image of Io in the lower panel. The lower image is the
result of combining three LBT images taken at different angles in the computer.