One of the original reasons for Hubble was to have a telescope above the atmosphere. The atmosphere distorts the light as it passes through making stars "twinkle."
Now we we use a laser beam to energize sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere. We see how that is distorted by the atmosphere so that with software we can cancel it out.
Combined with lucky imaging where instead of taking a single long exposure we take thousands of images in the 100 millisecond range. We can toss out the images where the atmosphere was moving a lot and combine the other good images.
The mirror in Hubble is 2.4 meters
Large ground based telescopes now have mirrors in multiple segments with motors keeping them at the right curvature.
The largest has 10.4 meter mirror. That is about 11 times larger area than Hubble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_optical_reflec...
One of the original reasons for Hubble was to have a telescope above the atmosphere. The atmosphere distorts the light as it passes through making stars "twinkle."
Now we we use a laser beam to energize sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere. We see how that is distorted by the atmosphere so that with software we can cancel it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_guide_star
Combined with lucky imaging where instead of taking a single long exposure we take thousands of images in the 100 millisecond range. We can toss out the images where the atmosphere was moving a lot and combine the other good images.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging