http://tinyurl.com/k43g3ao
July 8, 2013 - Discover
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 the engineers at the Gemini Observatory have taken blur-elimination
technology a step beyond. They have just equipped the 8.1-meter Gemini
South telescope, located atop Cerro Pachon in Chile, with a system
called GeMS...