Processed SPHERE image showing the moons of Kleopatra

This processed image, based on observations taken in July 2017, shows the two moons of the asteroid Kleopatra (the central white object), AlexHelios and CleoSelene, which appear as two small white dots in the top-right and bottom-left corners of the picture.

Kleopatra’s moons are difficult to see in the raw images — which were taken with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s VLT — owing to glare around the asteroid, inherent to this kind of adaptive-optics observations. To achieve this view, the images of Kleopatra have been processed to remove the glare and reveal the moons.