"The solution is lasers. Lick’s Shane telescope wields an adaptive optics system, which fires a beam into the atmosphere. “Adaptive optics measures the turbulence hundreds or thousands of times a second, and then changes the shape of a special mirror, called the deformable mirror, to take away the blurring,” says Max.

The Shane telescope also has a larger mirror than Hubble: 3 meters compared to 2.4 meters. So if there happens to be a bright enough star nearby your viewing target, Max says, “you can get the same kind of spatial resolution that Hubble gets, because our telescope is more or less the same size, and we're taking away the blurring of the atmosphere with adaptive optics.”"