A team of astronomers from the US and the UK has obtained some of the clearest pictures of space ever taken.They were acquired using a new "adaptive optics" system which sharpens pictures taken from the Mount Palomar Observatory in California.
The images are twice as sharp as those from Hubble Space Telescope.
The new system, dubbed "Lucky", is the result of work by a team from Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Pictures taken by Hubble are normally much better than images from ground-based telescopes because the Earth's atmosphere has a distorting effect.
The Lucky camera overcomes this problem in two ways.
First, it uses one of the most sensitive light-detection systems developed to date. This comprises a chip that has very low electrical noise and so can see much greater detail.
Secondly, the software system is able to distinguish when the atmospheric distortion starts and stops.
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