Astrophoto Friday: Adaptive Optics on the Moon

For Astrophoto Friday this week we have an animated gif showing what you can see when you point a 200-inch telescope armed with adaptive optics at the Moon:

The images were taken early in the morning of October 9, 2009 as the NASA LCROSS probe was impacting the dark lunar crater known as Cabeus.

One frame in this animated gif shows a view that is not corrected by adaptive optics. The second shows an adaptive-optics corrected image.

Cabeus is dark region in the center, just behind the large bright mountain. The field of view is 71 km (40 arcseconds, with ~200m resolution), recorded at 2.1 microns wavelength.

Thanks to Antonin Bouchez and the Adaptive Optics team at Palomar/Caltech/JPL for the use of the images.