For astronomers, it’s a magical moment: you’re staring at a monitor, and a blurry image of a cosmological object sharpens up, revealing new details. We call this “closing the loop,” a reference to the ...

Adaptive optics is a class of components that can be added to optical systems to improve their performance. They do this by reducing the incoming wave distortions which can arise due to natural ...

Stars in the night sky appear to twinkle because air moving in the atmosphere disrupts starlight before it reaches our eyes. While this phenomenon might make for a great nursery rhyme, it causes major ...

Astronomers have developed a new visible-light adaptive optics (AO) system for the 6.5 meter diameter Magellan-Clay telescope in Chile's Atacama desert. The new AO system replaces the secondary mirror ...

It used to be that if astronomers wanted to get rid of the blurring effects of the atmosphere, they had to put their telescopes in space. But a technology called adaptive optics has changed all that.

Scientists develop new optical system that removes blur over fine-structure in the Sun’s corona, revealing clearest images to date This time-lapse video of a prominence above the solar surface reveals ...

For non-astronomers, the twinkling of the stars can be quite romantic. For astronomers, it is the outward sign of a fundamental problem: As light passes through turbulent areas of the Earth's ...

New Technology Brings Space Telescope Image Quality Down to Earth, Offering Astronomical Image Clarity Never Seen Before The next generation of adaptive optics has arrived at the Large Binocular ...

The University of California, Santa Cruz, has received a grant of $9.1 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to establish a Laboratory for Adaptive Optics. The new laboratory strengthens ...