How does the "compensation for atmospheric turbulence" work? It honestly sounds impossible, like those tv shows where the detective "enhances" a blurry photo.
The replies already posted are quite good. Let me explain it a different way:
When light passes through the atmosphere, it undergoes a convolution known as a point spread function (think of it as convolving the signal with a 2D gaussian that spreads the intensity out to neighboring pixels). If we know that PSF specific details, we can deconvolve the image, either computationally, or by modifying the mirror in real time.
From my understanding, you can project a laser into the atmosphere, where it gets affected by the PSF. When you look at that laser projection, you can find the PSF (because you know the input shape of the laser, and what it looks like after being affected by the PSF), and therefore use that in real time to deconvolve the astronomic images you are collecting.
This process can be done so quickly it can adapt to immediate changes in the atmosphere (turbulence). "Enhance" is definitely a thing- it's widely used in both telescopes and microscopes (and if you had the right priors for a blurry photo, you could do it there too).
Sorry I'm not a big expert in the field of optics, but I am aware of our cameras being used to perform adaptive optics and lucky imaging.
Adaptive optics in particular requires very fast framerates and low latency to make rapid adjustments to the mirror's shape to compensate for the constantly changing atmosphere. It's really amazing that it's possible at all! I believe this is the method used here, though I can't say with certainty.
Lucky imaging is more akin to a brute force method, where you acquire lots and lots of images quickly and process the best ones when the atmosphere was being particularly cooperative at the time and not distorting the image very much.
Again, there are lots of experts out there on the topic, this is just my simple view into it.
It's a technological tour-de-force involving deformable mirrors that change shape every millisecond, cameras able to count every incoming photon, and special computers designed to calculate the next correction within microseconds. As usual wikipedia has an introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics
When light passes through the atmosphere, it undergoes a convolution known as a point spread function (think of it as convolving the signal with a 2D gaussian that spreads the intensity out to neighboring pixels). If we know that PSF specific details, we can deconvolve the image, either computationally, or by modifying the mirror in real time.
From my understanding, you can project a laser into the atmosphere, where it gets affected by the PSF. When you look at that laser projection, you can find the PSF (because you know the input shape of the laser, and what it looks like after being affected by the PSF), and therefore use that in real time to deconvolve the astronomic images you are collecting.
This process can be done so quickly it can adapt to immediate changes in the atmosphere (turbulence). "Enhance" is definitely a thing- it's widely used in both telescopes and microscopes (and if you had the right priors for a blurry photo, you could do it there too).
I think this is a relatively simple read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_guide_star along with https://www.llnl.gov/article/44936/guide-star-leads-sharper-...