A new camera technology has exceeded the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope
from the ground, at tiny fraction of the cost, 50,000 times cheaper, in fact (in my opinion vindicating my position that the space telescope is a collosal boondoggle, but that's neither here nor there).
Deploying the new camera technology to larger ground based telescopes should produce even higher resolution images.
http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~optics/Luc...eases_0807.htm
The technology relies on a camera taking video through a telescope at 20 frames per second. Because of randomly changing atmospheric distortions, some of these images are clearer than others. The very clearest are sorted out and then "added" using special software to produce the extremely high resolution images.