APOD: 2021 February 10 - Firing Lasers to Tame the Sky

Impressive and whoever came up with this solution is a genius

Thank you my friend Maj William W. 'Bill' Price for posting the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) for Wednesday, February 10, 2021 entitled "Firing Lasers to Tame the Sky."

Image: Firing Lasers to Tame the Sky - Image Credit & Copyright - Juan Carlos Muñoz - ESO; Text- Juan Carlos Muñoz

This may be an effort to announce the death knell of 'Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star' :-)

The image title seems to be over-the-top - "de-twinkling of stars is a developing field of technology and allows, in some cases, Hubble-class images to be taken from the ground."
Blaming sodium seems to be all-too-common. From too much sodium in food and drink to now sodium left by passing meteors which develop into artificial twinklers which impact the view of space :-)

Considering the fact that stars are hundreds and thousands of light-years away, the twinkling effects are centuries to millennia old :-)

APOD Background
"Explanation: Why do stars twinkle? Our atmosphere is to blame as pockets of slightly off-temperature air, in constant motion, distort the light paths from distant astronomical objects. Atmospheric turbulence is a problem for astronomers because it blurs the images of the sources they want to study. The telescope featured in this image, located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, is equipped with four lasers to combat this turbulence. The lasers are tuned to a color that excites atoms floating high in Earth's atmosphere -- sodium left by passing meteors. These glowing sodium spots act as artificial stars whose twinkling is immediately recorded and passed to a flexible mirror that deforms hundreds of times per second, counteracting atmospheric turbulence and resulting in crisper images. The de-twinkling of stars is a developing field of technology and allows, in some cases, Hubble-class images to be taken from the ground. This technique has also led to spin-off applications in human vision science, where it is used to obtain very sharp images of the retina.'


Oliver - Good Morning Starshine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whmzEXywq40

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I've read about this before (I'm an old school nerd, I still subscribe to Astronomy magazine), however the picture is really cool. Is that what it actually looks like in operation, or has it been retouched?