Daily Telescope: Shooting a laser into the sky from Antarctica

Enlarge / Shooting lidar into the night sky. (credit: Steve Erskine)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s January 24, and today’s image features an astronomical sight of another sort.

The image was taken by Steve Erskine a few years ago in Antarctica. Astronomers use lidar to measure the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere to calibrate their observations. In this photo, the lidar is being shot nearly straight up from an observatory at McMurdo Station.