Atmospheric turbulence above a telescope degrades the telescope's resolving power by shifting the position of the image on the retina of our eye or on a photographic film so that subsequent photons from the same part of the object strike the retina or film at positions adjacent to the position of the first photon from that part of the object. Thus a distant star that would be seen as a single pixel at a certain location is seen as a group of pixels centered around the same location. The group of pixels subtends a larger angle than the single pixel so the resolving power is diminished. A second single pixel star located one pixel away from the first star would form a pixel grouping that would merge with the pixel grouping of the first star so that both stars would be perceived as a single star.
The adaptive optics produced by CCD cameras works by collecting a series of images in a sequence of frames. The position of a prominent pixel is noted, and all the frames are shifted so that when they are superimposed to produce the final image, - all of them have the same prominent pixel in the same position. A fast CCD camera should be able to collect its frames fast enough to prevent "photon build-up" so that when the frames are integrated back into a single image, - the would be merged stars show up as the original pair of properly separated single pixel stars.