APOD: 2019 September 14 - Little Planet to Exoplanets

Good morning, Rallypoint. Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is titled "Little Planet to Exoplanets." We stay in Cynthia Croft's hemisphere and visit the SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) Southern Observatory in the Chilean Atacama desert. Its mission is to search for the telltale dimming that indicates the transit of terrestrial exoplanets around the population of nearby, tiny, dim, ultracool stars. The "little planet" is a mosaic of different perspectives of SPECULOOS. The curved arc captures a laser "guide star" from the nearby Paranal Observatory. Guide stars are actually directed emissions from laser excited sodium atoms at high altitudes within a telescopic field of view. Guide star image fluctuations are used in real-time to correct for atmospheric blurring and produce images with the same clarity as if the telescope were in space. The Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds are at image center and right.