LCROSS Impact Anniversary

Today marks the one year anniversary of the impact of the LCROSS spacecraft into the Moon.

Palomar Observatory observed the event with the 200-inch Hale Telescope's adaptive optics system. While the impact plume was not observed the research team that used the Hale returned some pretty impressive images. The images were the best from any telescope that observed the event. A short video was produced from the frames taken before and after the impact.

UK amateur astronomer Paul Coleman recently took the individual frames from the movie and combined them with the image processing program Registax. In the process Paul took a good image and made it even better.

The adaptive optics corrected image from the 200-inch is on the left and the result of combining many frames is on the right.

Thanks go out to Paul for doing this and allowing me to share it with everyone here.