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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In 1610, Galileo used a telescope to discover the four largest moons of Jupiter, and for more than two hundred years the only way to get a better look at the night sky was to build a bigger telescope.

Guide star-free imaging Image of a bee head acquired with a wide-field transmission microscope in the presence of aberrations (left) and after correction (right). The image inserts represent quantum ...

A new publication from Opto-Electronic Advances; DOI 10.29026/oea.2022.200082 reviews intelligent adaptive optics. Adaptive optics technology can correct the dynamic aberrations of optical system at ...

The W. M. Keck Observatory and ALPAO have announced that they are partnering to develop an adaptive optics system for the Keck II 10-meter telescope, located on Maunakea, Hawaii. The firms are working ...

When ground-based telescopes view stars, the light they collect must weave its way through layers of air. When those layers are turbulent, the light gets blurred, so images from observatories with ...

For centuries, astronomers looking up at the heavens through a telescope had a problem on their hands – the quality of their images depended on the strength and direction of the wind in the air.

The ability to achieve high-resolution optical imaging is essential in a variety of applications including astronomy and microscopy. Light can be perturbed when propagating through optical systems or ...

The use of deformable mirrors to correct unwanted optical aberrations in real time is helping applications ranging from astronomy to biophotonics and data storage, reports Neil Savage. Adaptive optics ...

As frustrating as having an atmosphere can be for physicists, it’s just as bad for astronomers, who have to deal with clouds, atmospheric absorption of certain wavelengths, and other irritations. One ...