AN EARTH-BASED telescope is taking pictures that are just as clear and sharp as images from the Hubble Space Telescope. A flexible mirror that can compensate for the Earth's distorting atmosphere allows the Yepun telescope in Chile to take pictures even better than those taken in space.
Ground-based telescopes don't have the size constraints of space-based ones, which have to be launched on a rocket. So they can have larger mirrors, giving sharper pictures. They're also much cheaper to build. But Earth-bound telescopes must view the heavens through the turbulent atmosphere, which distorts light, making images blurry.
The European Southern Observatory's Yepun telescope—one of four that make up the Very Large Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert—can now cut through the fog. Its newly installed optics system, called the Nasmyth Adaptive Optics System (NAOS), works by monitoring distortions in the pattern of light streaming from a reference star near the target ...
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