CAMBRIDGE A camera has been developed that has taken sharper images of space than ever seen before.

The so-called “lucky camera”, developed by astronomers at the University of Cambridge, can take pictures that are twice as good as those from the Hubble telescope, even though it is a ground-based telescope. Craig Mackay, who led the research, said: “These are the sharpest images ever taken from the ground or space and yet we are essentially using Blue Peter technology.”

Pictures from an observatory at Mount Palomar, California, have been taken of the globular star cluster M13, 25,000 light years away, and the Cat’s Eye Nebula.

Images from ground-based telescopes are usually blurred by the Earth’s atmosphere; the best images used to be taken using Earth-orbiting telescopes. The Cambridge team avoided this problem by “lucky imaging”. A high-speed camera takes images of the stars at 20 frames per second. By luck, some images are less blurred than others; the best can be combined to produce a sharp image. The pictures can be a higher quality than Hubble’s because space telescopes are limited in size, whereas those on the ground can provide a much higher resolution.

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