Gallery: A New Camera Turns an Earth Telescope into a Space Telescope

For three decades, astronomers have been waging war with the air around them, and slowly winning. A succession of increasingly advanced technologies--under the name active optics, and more recently adaptive optics--compensated for the continuous blowing, flowing, shimmering, and general blurring of Earth's atmosphere. These devices are not perfect, but they do a credible job sharpening the view. Essentially all of the world's major observatories now use some system along those lines. Now