Hubble Telescope vs. The Lucky Camera

"The object is distorted by the haze most of the time," the inventor of the system, Dr Craig Mackay of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge explained,"but every now and again there are moments when the haze drops and you can see it very clearly."

The Lucky system gathers together all the clear pictures and throws out the distortions to produce images that Dr Mackay believes are the clearest ever images from the ground.

"The images space telescopes produce are of extremely high quality but they are limited to the size of the telescope," Dr Mackay added. "Our techniques can do very well when the telescope is bigger than Hubble and has intrinsically better resolution."

Two images have been published to date. One is of the globular star cluster M13 which is at a distance of 25,000 light-years. (the mostly orange image on the top right)

Stars that are as little as one light-day apart can be differentiated in the picture.

The other shows very fine detail in the Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC6543). (the image to the left)

I can't begin to tell you how happy I am to post something with the word "globular" so prevalent in the text.