An earthling’s guide to planet hunting

But there’s another way over these hurdles. At her lab among the redwoods, Jensen-Clem and her students experiment with new technologies and software to help Keck’s primary honeycomb mirror and its smaller, “deformable” mirror see more clearly. Using measurements from atmospheric sensors, deformable mirrors are designed to adjust shape rapidly, so they can correct for distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere on the fly. 

This general imaging technique, called adaptive optics, has been…