Jupiter, looking sharp

This weird-looking image is the sharpest picture of Jupiter ever taken from the ground. Taken with a device called -- are you ready for this? -- the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (or MAD, in an acronymic stretch), it has a resolution better than Hubble's! The Earth's atmosphere roils and waves, distorting ground-based views of the sky. That's one of the reasons we launch telescopes into space, to get above all that mess. But if you can observe a point-like object such as a star at the same time you observe your target object, it's possible to compensate for the distortion by taking extremely rapid fire snapshots and measuring the way the star image changes. You then apply a correction to the image, and presto! It's cleaner. However, you can only do this for the area near the star. Distortions change across a telescope's field of view, making this technique somewhat ...