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Everyone knows holograms from their everyday life, for instance the ones applied to credit cards as security indicators. Unlike a photography of an object which only records the amplitude of the light wave coming from the object, the hologram also includes local information about the light wave's phase. In appropriate lighting, the initial wave front is reconstructed in proper phase and the spectator has a three dimensional sensation of the object. But it is not this characteristic of holography that is central when it comes to the imaging of small structures, but the fact that for the recording of a hologram no lenses are required at all. In order to conduct research on nanometer scaled objects, light of an equally small wave length is needed (soft X-rays). The only lenses working in this wave spectrum (so-called Fresnel zone plates) are very sophisticated in design and still yield a quality of imaging one scale inferior then lenses for visible light. The modus operandi of recording holograms without the use of lenses is to superimpose the light wave having radiated the object at the time of recording with a reference wave having a known and stable (coherent) phase.

Imagine you're a Brontosaurus1 with your face in a prehistoric tree top, munching on fresh leaves. Your relatives have ruled planet Earth for more than 150 million years. Huge and strong, you feel invincible. You're not. Fast forward about 65 million years. A creature much smaller and weaker dominates the Earth now, with brains instead of brawn. Its brain is a lot larger relative to its body size – plenty big enough to conceive a way to scan the cosmos for objects like the colossal asteroid that wrought the end of your kind. Right: An artist's concept of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). [more] The creature designed and built WISE, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, to search for "dark" objects in space like brown dwarf stars, vast dust clouds, and Earth-approaching asteroids. WISE finds them by sensing their heat in the form of infrared light most other telescopes can't pick up.