In astronomy, seeing is the degradation of the image of an astronomical object due to turbulence in the atmosphere of Earth that may become visible as blurring, twinkling or variable distortion. The origin of this effect is rapidly changing variations of the optical refractive index along the light path from the object to the detector. Seeing is a major limitation to the angular resolution in astronomical observations with telescopes that would otherwise be limited through diffraction by the size of the telescope aperture. Today, many large scientific ground-based optical telescopes include adaptive optics to overcome seeing.

The strength of seeing is often characterized by the angular diameter of the long-exposure image of a star (seeing disk) or by the Fried parameter r₀. The diameter of the seeing disk is the full width at half maximum of its optical intensity. An exposure time of several tens of milliseconds can be considered long in this context. The Fried parameter describes the size of an imaginary telescope aperture for which the diffraction limited angular resolution is equal to the resolution limited by seeing. Both the size of the seeing disc and the Fried parameter depend on the optical wavelength, but it is common to specify them for 500 nanometers. A seeing disk smaller than 0.4 arcseconds or a Fried parameter larger than 30 centimeters can be considered excellent seeing. The best conditions are typically found at high-altitude observatories on small islands, such as those at Mauna Kea or La Palma.

Astronomical seeing has several effects:

The effects of atmospheric seeing were indirectly responsible for the belief that there were canals on Mars.^{[citation needed]} In viewing a bright object such as Mars, occasionally a still patch of air will come in front of the planet, resulting in a brief moment of clarity. Before the use of charge-coupled devices, there was no way of recording the image of the planet in the brief moment other than having the observer remember the image and draw it later. This had the effect of having the image of the planet be dependent on the observer's memory and preconceptions which led the belief that Mars had linear features.

The effects of atmospheric seeing are qualitatively similar throughout the visible and near infrared wavebands. At large telescopes the long exposure image resolution is generally slightly higher at longer wavelengths, and the timescale (t₀ - see below) for the changes in the dancing speckle patterns is substantially lower.

There are three common descriptions of the astronomical seeing conditions at an observatory:

These are described in the sub-sections below:

Without an atmosphere, a small star would have an apparent size, an "Airy disk", in a telescope image determined by diffraction and would be inversely proportional to the diameter of the telescope. However, when light enters the Earth's atmosphere, the different temperature layers and different wind speeds distort the light waves, leading to distortions in the image of a star. The effects of the atmosphere can be modeled as rotating cells of air moving turbulently. At most observatories, the turbulence is only significant on scales larger than r₀ (see below—the seeing parameter r₀ is 10–20 cm at visible wavelengths under the best conditions) and this limits the resolution of telescopes to be about the same as given by a space-based 10–20 cm telescope.