>>10980844As others have pointed out, this is what you see as twinkling.
Earths atmosphere isn't perfectly transparent, there's some diffraction that happens as these lights hit the atmosphere and passes through different thermal layers. Think about how a pencil looks in a glass of water, how from certain angles it looks like the pencil "breaks" because water and air have a different refraction index.
New ground based telescopes being build use a laser to shine through the atmosphere and high powered cameras and sensors are able to detect the distortion in the laser beam to make minor adjustments to the reflecting mirrors to compensate for the atronomical see to get much higher resolution images.
Most visual astronomy uses long exposures, so while watching a single star it's twinkling averages out over the exposure so it just looks like what you're used to seeing.
Space based telescopes like the hubble don't have to worry about that, so they can get better resolution than far bigger ground based telescope because the only optical interference you're going to have is some interstellar dust and gas.
