Point Spread Function for Ground Layer Adaptive Optics

A ground-layer adaptive optics system (GLAO) uses a single adaptive mirror to partially correct the wavefront for atmospheric and telescope aberrations over a wide field of view. Instead of reaching diffraction limit on a narrow field, the idea is to provide partial improvement of the PSF over a wide field appropriate for multi-object spectrographs or wide field imagers. We derive an analytic formulation for the GLAO corrected PSF and then apply that in developing a methodology for calculating sensitivity improvement for astronomical instruments.