Mathematicians Are Making Earth Based Telescopes Rival Space Observatories

Comparison of an image from the Hyper Suprime-Cam, an ultra-wide-field camera mounted on the Subaru Telescope (left), with an image produced by the new ImageMM algorithm (right). The image on the left is of similar quality to images typically used in practice (Credit : Johns Hopkins University)

Earth's atmosphere has always been the enemy of ground based astronomy and don’t I know it. What would otherwise be crisp, clean datasets gets turned into blurry smudges. Space telescopes avoid the problem entirely but can only photograph tiny fragments of sky. Now, a team of mathematicians has cracked the code with an elegant algorithm that strips away atmospheric interference in seconds, potentially giving ground based observatories space quality vision whilst keeping their ability to survey great regions of sky.

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