the first answer to this problem was speckle imaging, which allowed bright objects with simple morphology to be observed with diffraction-limited angular resolution. later came nasa's hubble space telescope, working outside the atmosphere and thus not having any seeing problems and allowing observations of faint targets for the first time (although with poorer resolution than speckle observations of bright sources from ground-based telescopes because of hubble's smaller telescope diameter). the highest resolution visible and infrared images currently come from imaging optical interferometers such as the navy prototype optical interferometer or cambridge optical aperture synthesis telescope, but those can only be used on very bright stars.