Yes I did. But brainlocked on the name of the movie.
For some reason I had Wierd Science on the brain.

Great picture, yet one more to add to my wall paper collection.

The Earth’s atmosphere roils and waves, distorting ground-based views of the sky. That’s one of the reasons we launch telescopes into space, to get above all that mess. But if you can observe a point-like object such as a star at the same time you observe your target object, it’s possible to compensate for the distortion by taking extremely rapid fire snapshots and measuring the way the star image changes. You then apply a correction to the image, and presto! It’s cleaner. However, you can only do this for the area near the star. Distortions change across a telescope’s field of view, making this technique somewhat limited

Interestingly that’s some what, sort of, kind of how we used to correct for government scrambled GPS when I was in college. Take a known location point and time then reference GPS data against it to correct for what the Gov’t used to do to the GPS signals.

Sounds like space based optical telescopes may become obsolete though. What a thought! I never thought I’d hear of a day that ground would surpass Hubble. I wonder how much detail this could show on Jupiter’s moons.

Will this technique make space-based telescopes obsolete?

Only to a limited extent. As Macron points out, there are several wavebands that are strongly absorbed by our atmosphere. Additionally, no amount of adaptive optics will allow you to see through a cloud, so a space telescope will always get more observing time than a ground-based one. Also, good observing sites on Earth are in short supply (due to weather, light pollution or whatever).

Putting adaptive optics on a telescope in an old observatory may not be hugely productive in some cases, due to light pollution.

Although, you can probably get 20 MAD telescopes on the ground for the price of one space-based one.

Phil answered that question back in May, when I asked it in a video chat. He supposed recorded it, but it never made it onto his youtube channel.

He said no, because space-based telescopes can still be used to see forms of radiation that get absorbed by the atmosphere.

From the movie:

“What do you think a secret phase conjugate tracking system is for, Kent?”

I had to laugh.

Resolution better than Hubble? Whoa!

I’d like to see this used on Pluto or Eris.
I’d also settle for Uranus and Neptune. Not enough pretty images of those planets are around!

The answer to your two questions are: Yes, and yes. Click on my name for details.

JC

Seriously tho, a friend of mine was up at Mt. Wilson the other night and heard about the way the 100 inch telescope (I think it was the 100 inch) was using adaptive optics now. Way cool possibilities for upgrading old, historical scopes.