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Mauna Kea - Oct. 25, 2000 Astronomers observing with the adaptive optics instrument on the Keck II Telescope have obtained the best pictures yet of the planet Neptune, showing an upper atmosphere rich with moving features such as vortices, waves and narrowly spaced bands of clouds similar to those present around Jupiter. The team - which included astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL); the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech; and UCLA - presented the near-infrared images of the giant ice planet today (OCT. 25, 2000) at the American Astronomical Society?s Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Pasadena, Cal. The team captured the Neptune images on five nights of observing on Keck II between June 8 and 28 of this year. They had hoped to track characteristics of very bright features previously seen on the planet, but the detail in the images were beyond their expectations. "We've never seen the detail we see now," said team leader Imke de Pater, a professor of astronomy and of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley. "This shows us how much structure there is in the planet's atmosphere, how dynamic it is - as dynamic as Jupiter." The team, which collaborates through the National Science Foundation's Center for Adaptive Optics at UC-Santa Cruz, consisted of UC-Berkeley graduate students Shuleen Chau Martin and Henry Roe, and LLNL physicists Claire Max, Bruce Macintosh and Seran Gibbard. The team also is presenting new near infrared pictures of the planet Uranus that mark the first ground-based detection of the faint rings around that planet.
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