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UCSC's Center for Adaptive Optics is a research center to develop means for astronomers to correct for the distortion that is inevitably introduced when objects are viewed through the Earth's turbulent atmosphere, i.e. removing the twinkling of starlight. Without adaptive optics, images taken at ground-based telescopes are typically smeared by half an arcsecond or more, reducing both the resolution of the images and the sensitivity of the telescope since the light is spread over a larger area. CfAO research at UCSC promises resolution four or five times better than HST on existing telescopes like Keck, and potentially far better on the next generation of even larger telescopes.
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