 Astronomy inspires humankind by revealing its place in the universe. The creation of elements, solar systems, and the life and death of stars and galaxies are unraveled in front of us by the use of advanced technologies. The next generation telescopes such as the Giant Magellan Telescope will permit us to peer even deeper into the universe than we've ever been able to do before. The seven petals of this giant telescope will act as a single 25-meter diameter mirror. It will be the largest ever constructed. That's because in astronomy, size does matter. The bigger the telescope, the further you can peer into the universe. But the telescope is only one part of the equation to getting these images. During its travel down to Earth, light gets distorted by the very few meters of its travel through the atmosphere. This is the same problem you encounter when you're flying an aircraft, air turbulence. There are pockets of cold and hot air that act as individual lenses and they send the light in different directions. So what happens is the light that arrives at the telescope is not flat anymore. It's not a flat wavefront. It's a distorted wavefront. And it has many ripples just like the one seen at the surface of the swimming pool. The telescope cannot do anything better than create a fuzzy blob out of this distorted wavefront. Fortunately, the astronomy community has developed a sophisticated technique called adaptive optics which enables us to correct for the atmospheric distortions of the light in real time. Adaptive optics can restore the sharpness of the original images of planets and stars as if we were imaging them from space instead of doing this from the ground. As part of this technique, we also use powerful lasers which we use to create artificial stars in the upper atmosphere. These artificial stars are very bright and they are brighter than the natural stars and that's why we use them to probe the atmospheric turbulence above our telescope. We also use specially made mirrors called deformable mirrors which are able to bend and take the shape of the distorted wavefront so that when the light is bounced off the deformable mirror it cancels out the effect of the atmosphere and basically restores the original image quality of your instruments. These deformable mirrors, they are exquisite examples of advanced optomechanic systems. They contain thousands of actuators which can all move by just a few microns. That's the 100th width of a human hair. And they take whatever shape is necessary to compensate for the distortions. Adaptive optics is just one example of advanced technologies that have been developed for astronomy which we can use and apply in other disciplines. At the Austrian National University we are motivated by bringing those technological solutions to solve other big problems that humankind is facing. For instance, recent developments in lasers and adaptive optics enable Australia to have become a world leader in the area of ground-based space situational awareness. We are monitoring the growing space traffic and also its major threat, the threat of space debris. By using exquisite optical metrology techniques such as the one on board this NASA graceful on mission and combining those with other techniques like infrared detectors and advanced interferometry, we are planning for the next generation for mission-flying missions which will be used for astronomy and Earth observing. By using our knowledge of lasers and adaptive optics and combining that with advanced quantum encryption technologies we are also developing tools for advanced communications, laser communications with high throughput and secure communications as well around the Earth and into deep space. Infrared detector technology developed for astronomy can also be used to monitor the health of crops around the world from airborne platforms and space-based platforms. So these are just a few examples of all these techniques that have been developed for astronomy which can be applied in other disciplines. At the Austrian National University we have large multidisciplinary teams of astronomers, instrument scientists and engineers who are all working together to bring these technological solutions to the rest of the world. Thank you for your attention.