Two Sydney university students have helped fix the world's most powerful space telescope - and have the matching tattoos to prove it.
Louis Desdoigts and Max Charles, both University of Sydney students, helped deliver a software tweak to the $15 billion James Webb Space Telescope to fix a blurring issue without the need for a trip to space.
Supervised by Professor Peter Tuthill and Associate Professor Ben Pope, the duo spent two years developing software that predicts where the blurring will occur and fixes it in post-production.
"Instead of fixing the lens, we really precisely predict how it will blur via modelling, we know how it will blur and we can guess what it looked like if it didn't," Mr Charles told AAP.
"I'm pretty proud but I'm pretty lucky because I did a walk into the research group that designed the instrument and already had people working on it ... I'm very grateful."
Mr Charles recalled Dr Desdoigts when he asked to join his work on the "biggest, shiniest new thing".
"He says, 'You don't want to do that, man, that's a terrible idea, there's this blurring effect in the camera and it's ruining everything'," Mr Charles said.
Two years later, the telescope is producing crisper images than ever.
Mr Charles' research has since captured high-resolution images of a black hole jet, the volcanic surface of one of Jupiter's moons.
The pair recently met up in the Netherlands, where Dr Desdoigts has scored a postdoctoral research position, and celebrated their accomplishments with matching tattoos of the telescope.
Dr Desdoigts said they had wanted the tattoos, but promised themselves the would fix the blurring problem first before getting them done.
"Restoring the performance of the one mode that is broken on the world's foremost telescope is the kind of thing only a handful of people ever get to do, I thought that was worth commemorating," he told AAP.
"Max didn't even take any convincing ... but now we are working together to get our supervisors to get one, too - after all (Prof Tuthill), did design the mask we use in this mode."
