E-Mail IMAGE: A SuperBIT optical and ultraviolet composite image of the 'Pillars of Creation', trunks of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, 7,000 light years away in the direction of the... view more Credit: SuperBIT team, from Romualdez et al. (2018) SPIE 10702. Durham, Toronto and Princeton Universities have teamed up with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency to build a new kind of astronomical telescope. SuperBIT flies above 99.5% of the Earth's atmosphere, carried by a helium balloon the size of a football stadium. The telescope will make its operational debut next April and when deployed should obtain high-resolution images rivalling those of the Hubble Space Telescope. Mohamed Shaaban, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, will describe SuperBIT in his talk today (Wednesday 21 July) at the online RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2021).