...and atmospheric distortion. That's a much harder problem, although there have been innovations there, as well - some of which have been applied by astronomer

...and atmospheric distortion. That's a much harder problem, although there have been innovations there, as well - some of which have been applied by astronomers to improve the imagery of ground-based telescopes (e.g., digitally processing images based on the observed distortion of a reference image, such as a simple laser from a geosynchronous orbit captured at the same moment).