Again and again I'm amazed by our growing ability to tease information out of apparent noise. Consider the problem of viewing celestial objects from Earth's surface. The image below demonstrates the latest way to remove atmospheric blur that would otherwise bedevil a ground-based telescope. We're looking at Jupiter through a prototype instrument called the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (MAD). This is a form of adaptive optics that uses two guide stars (or in this case, two of Jupiter's moons) instead of one as references, allowing a wider field of view. Adaptive optics involves real-time corrections made at high speed, feeding a computer-controlled deformable mirror that interprets the atmospheric distortion by examining light from the chosen guide stars. Normally, the method works with a single guide star, but that allows for atmospheric corrections only in a tiny region of sky. The new MAD methods significantly overcome this limitation. The false-color infrared...

Hubble's ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury (ANGST) has everything going for it but the right acronym. One thing the spectacular images returned from this work definitely do not lead to is a deep, philosophical fear or, as 'angst' is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, "A feeling of anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression." Quite the contrary, the results of ANGST are all but euphoric in their celebration of stars in the galaxies we see around us, fully sixty nine galaxies in the so-called 'Local Volume.' The euphoria comes from Hubble's sharp vision. The Local Volume encompasses galaxies beyond the Local Group, with distances in the survey ranging from 6.5 million light years to 13 million light years from Earth. That's actually close enough that the right tools for seeing -- Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 -- can pull individual stars out of what had been an indistinct galactic background. Out of that we stand to learn...