Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Image of the odd Dwarf Planet Haumea

The VLT telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile continues to astound with it's discoveries even though the array is yet to be fully online. In this series of photos assembled from data captured by the VLT. Here is the fifth dwarf planet of the Solar System named Haumea. The dwarf has a pronounced ovoid shape and is almost 1300 miles at it's widest. Haumea has another curious feature. As the Daily Galaxy blog article states:
  • It spins completely in less than four hours, at one of the fastest rotation speeds in the Solar System
***I should take a moment to clear up some confusion that a reader brought up. NASA and the VLT are working with DATA so they (would be my guess) assembled the data and put it through an image generator. I assumed that everyone at this point knew that dvices "image of the day" could be an image or an extrapolation. In fairness I looked at what was labeled "artistic" and just the fact that the images were hi fi kind of gave you a hint. These were far less data rich leading to the thought that every one was using a more realistic data set...
Oh well live and learn....***

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

These aren't photos! They are clearly some kind of animation.

These "artist renderings" annoy me. It's just guesswork!