A new instrument will give Earthbound astronomers a clear view to rival space telescopes

An ambitious collaboration led by Australian, French, and Italian scientists, together with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) located in Chile, is aimed at fixing the distortion of images from Earth-based telescopes caused by the Earth’s atmosphere, by designing a giant pair of “glasses” to correct the vision of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the ESO.

A new instrument, dubbed “MAVIS” (MCAO Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph), will correct for these distortions in real time, delivering crystal clear images and “3D” data portraits of objects millions of light years away.