Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a telescope suspended from a football stadium sized balloon developed by an international team including astronomers from Durham University. The collaboration, which also includes NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and Toronto and Princeton universities, is an ingenious solution to the problems faced by ground-based and space telescopes. The giant helium balloon will suspend the telescope, known as SuperBIT (the Superpressure balloon-borne imaging telescope), to a height of 40 kilometres, above 99.5 percent of the atmosphere. This is vital as atmospheric fluctuations are the bane of astronomers on Earth; they distort the light that passes through the atmosphere making high-resolution imaging of space from the ground extremely difficult.