The location is the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii, and this fantastic footage was shot by Sean Goebel.
The lasers are indeed real. They’re used for adaptive optics. Just as waves of heat coming off pavement blur out the detail in faraway objects, winds in the atmosphere blur out fine detail in the stars/galaxies/whatever is being observed.
The laser is used to track this atmospheric turbulence, and one of the mirrors in the telescope bends hundreds of times per second in order to cancel out the blurring.
Just watching this video, I feel we’re not far from finding the nearest intelligent life at this rate.
