Gemini Planet Imager

Keep an eye out for this term over the next few years. The Gemini Planet Imager is an adaptive optics instrument that saw first light recently and imaged an exoplanet the other day, and the results look phenomenal. The image in that article is a large exoplanet around 60 light years away, and the planet in the image looks to be maybe...15 pixels or so wide. I've surmised in other posts before that inhabitable exoplanet discoveries will probably not enter our general consciousness until we have an image of at least reasonable quality. Something large enough to give a person chills in looking at it.

On the site we can also see an image produced of Europa, compared to the close-up images we have from Galileo and the Voyagers before it. I kind of feel like bugging them to take a look at 24 Themis.

GPI can look at worlds in our solar system, like Jupiter's moon Europa (right) and a probe-based picture on the left. pic.twitter.com/GhJR1wX0Dd
— Gemini Planet Imager (@PlanetImager) 7 Janvier 2014