Large Binocular Telescope- Ground based, 10 times the resolution of Hubble

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The BBC explains:

“"The images that this telescope will produce will be like none seen before," said Professor Peter Strittmatter of the University of Arizona.

The first pictures are false-colour images of the spiral galaxy NGC 2770. The pictures show what is a flat disc of stars and glowing gas.

The images - which take advantage of the telescope's ability to view the same point in space with multiple wavelengths of light - emphasise different features of the galaxy.”

I work on Galaxy Zoo when I can, classifying galaxies, and I can confirm that the general quality of pictures varies from the fantastic to the Rorschach Test.

Classifying blobs can be slightly frustrating. They’re supposed to be elliptical galaxies, but detail is seriously lacking, and sometimes it’s hard to deal with multiple images when you can’t figure out the perspective.

I’ve classified over 1300 of the things, I’ve seen colliding galaxies, and with Galaxy Zoo, I might have been the first person to see some of them since they did the imaging. But LBT really is something else. High resolution colors, and great definition.

The LBT website is pretty impressive, and the Image Gallery is really something. LBT has taken some pictures of very well known astronomical images like the Crab Nebula, and you can see the difference.

Eventually, this will work on space-based telescopes, too. The multiple light frequency approach is like modern speakers and amplifiers, getting good signals across the range. Not squashing them all into one receiver.

Hubble is the tool that made astronomy the pinup girl of space science, and this is the technology to continue the work.