Sharpest photo of Jupiter from Earth

This is the sharpest "whole Jupiter" photo ever taken from Earth. It was snapped with a telescope using special adaptive optics to reduce fuzz. From National Geographic:

Captured using a new computer-assisted process and a 27-foot (8.2-meter) telescope in Chile, the result is sharp enough to show features as small as 180 miles (300 kilometers) across...

Adaptive optics, (UC Berkeley/SETI Institute astronomer Franck) Marchis said, adjusts for distortions caused by the Earth's atmosphere, "providing images as if the telescope was in space."

New Jupiter Image: Sharpest View Ever From Earth

UPDATE: In the comments, DAEMON kindly posted a link to the full res image!

• [anthropomorphictoast]

  ooOooooooh. Pretty.

• [Ugly Canuck]

  Fantastic…I remember the first Voyager pix of jupiter back in 1979-80, nobody was prepared for the baroque complexity of the clouds, neither in color nor form. A psychedelic-looking planet, when compared to the images of Mars, Venus, Earth, Mercury and our Moon then available.
  Nice to see Earth-based telescopy getting so fine, can’t wait for the next-gen space telescope to see first light.

• [technogeek]

  Desktopped. (Replaces earth-from-space which was previously on this machine.)

  Not quite good enough to replace the nighttime picture of an Apollo waiting for launch on my other machine, though. And variety is a Good Thing anyway.

• [Drew from Zhrodague]

  Let’s go there and check it out!!!

• [franko]

  wow….
  wow, wow, wow.

  … it’s BLUER than i always imagined…

• [Takuan]

  http://www.hao.ucar.edu/Public/education/img/galileo_jupiter.gif

• [zandar]

  Jupiter looks delicious. Now, for a quarter-million mile wide sesame seed bun.

• [CptNemo]

  To be honest, I was expecting to see more detail.

  http://www.damianpeach.com/jup_07.htm

  This is a sample of what an amateur can do with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment, a lot of skill and time.

  I think the amateur results are very close indeed to the resolution of this image.

  Maybe it meant to say highest resolution IR image or something.

• [Justin Ried]

  That’s gorgeous. Is a hi-res version available? The article doesn’t mention one.

• [Daemon]

  Needs a link to a full resolution…

  http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2008/phot-33-08.html

• [Justin Ried]

  Daemon read my mind.

• [SamF]

  I can see my house from here!

• [phillamb168]

  What’s interesting is the color doesn’t match the standard Jupiter photos you see everywhere. Is this because of the anti-aberration tech, or is this what it actually looks like?

• [David Pescovitz]

  Thanks, DAEMON! I updated my post.

• [KurtMac]

  @#5 PHILLAMB168: The full-res link explains in better detail, but these images were taken at “infrared wavelengths where absorption due to hydrogen and methane is strong. This explains why the colours are different from how we usually see Jupiter in visible-light.”

• [Nixar]

  You should credit the ESO (European Southern Observatory) and the VLT (Very Large Telescope)

• [royaltrux]

  Thanks, Kurtmac, I’ve been wondering about that since this image surfaced last week.