In March 2003, the Subaru Telescope, located on the summit of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii, captured light from a galaxy 12.8 billion light years away from the earth. In other words, this was a snapshot of a galaxy as it appeared 12.8 billion years ago.

Making this achievement possible was the Subaru Telescope's prime focus camera, which has a field of view about 10 times as wide as that of the Hubble Space Telescope. Clear visual images are sent to this camera via the Canon creation known as the Prime Focus Corrector Lens, an "ultracompact" lens unit with a diameter of more than 50 cm. By focusing on and exposing a single point in the Subaru Deep Field for nearly 10 hours, the depth of outer space that the telescope can observe, the Subaru Telescope was able to capture light emitted by ancient objects unimaginably far away from our world.

Canon used to have a business division devoted to developing revolutionary telescope lenses and measuring equipment, as well as infrared cameras for installation on orbital satellites and antennas for optical communications. This division, the SO Project, started as a small team of only 12 members. This is the story of how they developed the GLI (Global Imager), a world-class, high-performance optical unit installed in the Advanced Earth Observing Satellite-II (ADEOS-II), also known as Midori-II.