Images: Observatories at the top of the world

Overlooking the clouds in this photograph is the optical/infrared Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. It's operated, as you might expect from the name, by the National Research Council of Canada, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France, and the University of Hawaii. The telescope has an aperture of 3.58 meters and began operation in September 1979. One of its projects is called Visible All Sky Adaptive Optics, and it promises to provide higher-resolution photographs of the sky (at least that portion visible from Hawaii) than the Hubble Space Telescope can do.