Astronomers use two basic methods to find planets around other stars: watching to see if a star dims when a planet passes in front of it, and watching to see if a star wobbles when a planet orbits around it. Neither of these methods are very good at seeing planets directly, but a giant zeppelin-mounted aerial starshade might be able to change that.

Andrew Cooper put together this video of the two Keck telescopes in action on top of Mauna Kea in Hawai'i. There are some beautiful time-lapse shots like in the pic above, but the reason to watch this video is for all the behind-the-scenes footage showing what telescopes like this have going on behind the mirror.

With adaptive optics, ground-based telescopes are able to compensate for atmospheric distortions to bring their views of the universe up to par with space-based telescopes like Hubble. An absolutely monstrous new telescope is currently under construction, with a 28-foot mirror starting to be spun just this week.

Astronomers in Chile have just fired up the ALMA radio telescope array for the very first time. ALMA is destined to be the largest, most expensive, and most powerful telescope array on the planet, and when the array of 66 telescopes is completed in 2013, ALMA will be able to resolve images of galaxies that are an incredible ten times sharper than the best that we can get from Hubble.