It’s sometimes easy to forget that the light in the sky is an actual star. With how reliable it is and how busy we tend to be as humans, we can take that incredible fact and stow it away and largely ...

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.

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 ...

The Adaptive Optics Lucky Imager (AOLI) on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) has obtained its first adaptive-optics closed-loop results, an important milestone in the development of this ...

Researchers have developed a new plug-and-play device that can add adaptive optics correction to commercial optical microscopes. Adaptive optics can greatly improve the quality of images acquired deep ...

Foreword / Robert Q Fugate -- Preface -- Introduction -- List of acronyms -- 1: Sputnik, reality, and technology -- 2: Early days: the Romans -- 3: Rome and Itek: first adaptive optics systems -- 4: ...

Dabei sollen rund 11.000 PICMA® Multilayer-Piezoaktoren in einer extrem genau arbeitenden adaptiven Optik (XAO) eingesetzt werden, um bei einem Rastermaß von weniger als 4 mm einen klaren und scharfen ...

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 ...

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.

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. Download PDF ...