Adaptive Optics, a rapidly-evolving technology in astronomy

I'm surprised there's no mention to adaptive optics in solar physics. It's essentially the same, but some interesting differences. Since there's more light you can have more corrections per second, better approaching the assumption of constant deformación during between corrections on a small view angle ("constant isoplanatic patch"). Also there's no "perfect star" to correct to, so calculation run on a closed loop to basically improve contrast of the reference. The needed correction is also bigger during the day, since the atmosphere is more turbulent. In the last few years there also have been really cool improvements to account for different layers of the atmosphere and better faster algorithms to correct wider and wider fields of view. This is an example (from my PhD) of the state of the art 9 years ago, but illustrates the huge difference: https://youtu.be/x3JkjXco6m0

This article is very light on details about the proposed next-gen adaptive optics system. If you already know what that means, the only new info I could glean was that they mean to use seven laser spots ("guide stars") instead of one.

The author, Andrea Ghez, is one of the leading researchers on observing the center of our galaxy, and the stars that orbit the central black hole, among other things.

Sounds like a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, just being measured many times throughout the exposure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shack–Hartmann_wavefront_senso...

> there is really no substitute for the light-gathering power of telescopes too huge to be put into space.

Why is there any limit to the size of telescopes we can put in space? The mirrors are segmented anyway - just stack 'em on top of a couple of rockets and assemble in orbit.

So, unlike radio astronomy, it's not feasible yet to have multiple, smaller coherent telescopes? A phased array with magnitude and phase correction being applied to each telescope.