Overcoming Atmospheric Seeing
The first answer to this problem was speckle imaging, which allowed bright objects to be observed with very high resolution. Later came NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, working outside the atmosphere and thus not having any seeing problems and allowing observations of faint targets for the first time (although with poorer resolution than speckle observations of bright sources from ground-based telescopes because of Hubble's smaller telescope diameter). The highest resolution visible and infrared images currently come from imaging optical interferometers such as the Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer or Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope.
Starting in the 1990s, many telescopes have begun to develop adaptive optics systems that partially solve the seeing problem, but none of the systems so far built or designed completely removes the atmosphere effect, and observations are usually limited to a small region of the sky surrounding relatively bright stars.
Another cheaper technique, lucky imaging, has had very good results. This idea dates back to pre-war naked-eye observations of moments of good seeing, which were followed by observations of the planets on cine film after World War II. The technique relies on the fact that every so often the effects of the atmosphere will be negligible, and hence by recording large numbers of images in real-time, a 'lucky' excellent image can be picked out. This technique can outperform adaptive optics in many cases and is even accessible to amateurs. It does, however, require very much longer observation times than adaptive optics for imaging faint targets, and is limited in its maximum resolution.
Read more about this topic: Astronomical Seeing
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