Fuzzy blob

Figure 6.1 Attack of the proplyds A Hubble Space Telescope close-up of the Orion Nebula reveals disks of dust and gas surrounding newly formed stars. These fuzzy blobs, called proplyds, may be infant solar systems in the process of formation. This chunk of the sky spans about 0.14 light-years. (Image courtesy of Charles Robert O Dell of Vanderbilt University and NASA.)...

Figure 8.1 Adaptive optics in astronomy, (a) The image of a star appears as a fuzzy blob in a telescope due to the wavefront aberrations caused by turbulence in the atmosphere, (b) If a deformable mirror is used to correct the image of the star to make it back into a point of Ught, a nearby galaxy with a more complex structure will also be corrected, (c) The wavefront distortions can be measured with a wavefront sensor. The wavefront distortions from the guide star are fed back through a control system to deform the adaptive mirror to a shape that is conjugate to the distorted wavefront, correcting the reflected wavefront of the guide star back into a plane wave. (Credit Claire Max, Center for Adaptive Optics.) [7],...

Viewed by transmitted light, tortoiseshell displays a pattern of irregular, fuzzy areas of brown against the honey-coloured background. They consist of minute blobs of colour, closely packed, and are continuous throughout the thickness of the material, rather than just on the surface (Figs 8.4 and 8.15). 

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