Georgia State Astronomers' Software Helps Capture Unprecedented Images

ATLANTA — Stuart Jefferies, a professor in Georgia State’s Physics & Astronomy Department, is part of a team of scientists from around the world that captured a volcanic event on Jupiter’s moon Io at a resolution never before achieved with Earth-based instruments. The observations were made possible by a new high-contrast optical imaging instrument, dubbed SHARK-VIS, and a new software called Kraken created by Jefferies and Georgia State Adjunct Senior Research Associate Douglas Hope.

Capturing clear images of objects in our solar system from Earth is challenging due to light distortion from our turbulent atmosphere. While SHARK-VIS helps to partially correct light distortion, the Kraken software is used to make the images even clearer.

“Our software estimates the residual distortions in the light and uses this information to numerically de-blur the image through a process called deconvolution,” Jefferies said. “The resulting image has a resolution that is nearly as sharp as if we took the image from space.”

The images of Io were taken by the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona. The images reveal surface features as small as 50 miles across, a spatial resolution that until now had been achievable only with spacecraft sent to Jupiter. This is equivalent to taking a picture of a dime-sized object from 100 miles away, according to the research team. SHARK-VIS allowed the researchers to identify a major resurfacing event around Pele, one of Io’s most prominent volcanoes. According to Al Conrad, an associate staff scientist at the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory, a division of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, the eruptions on Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system, dwarf their counterparts on Earth.

“Io, therefore, presents a unique opportunity to learn about the mighty eruptions that helped shape the surfaces of the Earth and the Moon in their distant pasts,” Conrad said.

Conrad added that studies like this one will help researchers understand why some worlds in the solar system are volcanic, but not others.

The Kraken software used to sharpen the images of Io is a project sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Jefferies believes the work on the Io observations could be a major advancement in the field of astronomy.

“We believe that this result with Io will shine some serious light on our code. We are hoping that our code will become the image restoration code of choice for astronomers,” Jefferies said.

Jefferies said the software could also have other uses.

“We want to build some instrumentation for studying macular degeneration in the human eye. The code we’ve developed for looking into the heavens could be modified to help provide the sharp images of the back of the eye once this new instrument is built,” Jefferies said.

In 2022, Jefferies was awarded funding from the Research Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) challenge, which he used to develop Georgia State’s Imaging Hub. The hub provides a “toolbox” of imaging expertise tackling issues like global-scale health issues, environmental and ecological problems, planetary defense and even questions over the origins of life.

Jefferies and his colleagues’ work observing and capturing images of Io has been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.