Images: Taking the blur out of heavenly pictures

This pair of images shows the M13 globular star cluster about 25,000 light-years away with and without the lucky imaging technique. (Each light-year, the distance light will travel in a year, is about 6 trillion miles.) Lucky imaging allows astronomers to resolve the differences between stars only a single light-day apart. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge in the U.K. developed the lucky imaging technique for ground-based telescopes, arguing that it's cheaper and more effective than space-based telescopes. These images were taken with the 200-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory.

Photo by University of Cambridge