Space telescopes are great — so why do we still build ground-based ones?

At the dawn of the 17th Century, Galileo Galilei began the first major search of the night sky (as well as the Sun!) using a new Dutch invention — the telescope. In the era when William Shakespeare wrote the works that would make him famous, people (and telescopes) were bound to the ground — even hot air balloons would not carry passengers for nearly two more centuries. For well over a dozen generations, every great observational discovery in astronomy was discovered using telescopes sitting firmly on the ground. The atmosphere above the heads of astronomers distorted images from space, but…

This story continues at The Next Web