Astronomers have taken pictures of objects that are higher in resolution and less expensive than any of the pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Researchers at the University of Cambridge in England and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California utilized an adaptive-imaging technique and a camera called Lucky Cam to take the sharpest pictures of nebulae and stars ever produced from a ground-based observatory. Not only does the shimmering of the Earth's atmosphere make stars twinkle, but it also limits the resolution of images from ground-based telescopes. To reduce some of the smearing of the image, astronomers use adaptive optics (AO) systems, which are so far most beneficial in the infrared part of the spectrum. To enable high-resolution imaging at visible wavelengths, Cambridge imaging researcher Craig Mackay created the Lucky Cam, an ultralow-noise, electron multiplying, charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera. The camera is called Lucky because it depends on chance imaging of an object when it is least affected by poor atmospheric viewing. By mounting the camera behind an AO system at the 200 in. (5.1 m) Palomar telescope at Mount Palomar in California, astronomers created pictures that doubled the sharpness of the pictures taken from the HST, marking the first time this was achieved and applied to large telescopes. The low cost means that the technique can be used by telescopes around the world. As a result, astronomers at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California are creating PALM-3000, the first-ever astronomical adaptive-optics system enhanced to capture visible-light images. The enhanced Palomar AO system, which could be available as early as 2010, will allow finer correction of the atmospheric blurring than any current adaptive-optics system, providing long-exposure images with equally fine detail as the recently taken lucky images.