Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science has a tiny little planetarium. The planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History seats 429. The planetarium at the Lawrence Hall of Science in the hills about UC Berkeley seats 50. There’s something about the intimate, lo-fi nature of that tiny little planetarium that made the universe seem unimaginably immense. And back when planetariums used analog projection rather than digital cameras, the fidelity was even lower. Imagination filled the empty spaces. Fidelity can’t always track the poetry of nature.
But when the definition gets high enough, celestial bodies can come out of the other side, and the dreamlike reality of space can return in full force. That’s the sort of project India’s Chandrayaan 2 is on as it creates the highest resolution images of Earth’s Moon ever created. Here’s more from Universe Today:
Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has an optical camera called the Orbiter High-Resolution Camera (OHRC) which captures detailed images of the Moon. OHRC can image at a best resolution of 0.25 meters/pixel, beating NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (LRO) best of 0.5 meters/pixel.
Back in October, we already saw OHRC flex its muscles by sending images where boulders less than 1 meter in size were clearly visible. And now OHRC has demonstrated imaging an area not directly illuminated by sunlight! It captured an image of a crater floor in shadowby seeing the dim light falling on it that has been reflected from the crater rim!