Astronomers from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a new camera that gives much more detailed pictures of stars and nebula than even the Hubble Space Telescope, and it does all this from the ground.
Images from ground-based telescopes are usually blurred out by the atmosphere. Scientists have tried to develop techniques to correct the blurring called „adaptive optics“ but so far they only work successfully in the infrared where the smearing is greatly reduced. However a new noise-free, high-speed camera has been developed at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge which makes very high resolution imaging possible in the visible light. The camera works by recording the images produced by an adaptive optics front-end at high speed (20 frames per second or more). Software then checks each one to pick the sharpest ones. Many are still quite significantly smeared but a good percentage are unaffected. These are combined to produce the image that astronomers want. They call the technique „Lucky Imaging“ because it depends on the chance fluctuations in the atmosphere sorting themselves out. The first images are of NGC 6543, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, and M13.
Lucky Cam Adaptive Optics on the 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory

Lucky Imaging Website