That first mirror has been polished to more than 99 percent of perfection, according to three tests devised by the Mirror Lab and its partners in the UA College of Optical Sciences. On Saturday, its ...

If you have ever attended a club star party or an amateur astronomy convention, you have undoubtedly strolled through an observing field. Scattered throughout are silhouettes of telescopes and ...

Before And After: These near-infrared images of Uranus show the planet as seen without adaptive optics (left) and with the technology turned on (right). (Courtesy of Heidi B. Hammel and Imke de Pater) ...

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 ...

It used to be that if astronomers wanted to get rid of the blurring effects of the atmosphere, they had to put their telescopes in space. But a technology called adaptive optics has changed all that.