Related papers: LGS AO Science Impact: Present and Future Perspect…

In this paper, we present a first comparison of different Adaptive Optics (AO) concepts to reach a given scientific specification for 3D spectroscopy on Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). We consider that a range of 30%-50% of Ensquarred…

We present an analysis of the scientific ("refereed") paper productivity of the current largest (diameter >8 m) ground-based optical(-infrared) telescopes during the ten year period from 2000 to 2009. The telescopes for which we have…

Robo-AO is an autonomous laser guide star adaptive optics system recently commissioned at the Kitt Peak 2.1-m telescope. Now operating every clear night, Robo-AO at the 2.1-m telescope is the first dedicated adaptive optics observatory.…

We present an analytical derivation of the on-axis performance of Adaptive Optics systems using a given number of guide stars of arbitrary altitude, distributed at arbitrary angular positions in the sky. The expressions of the residual…

The Lick Observatory's Shane 3-meter telescope has been upgraded with a new infrared instrument (ShARCS - Shane Adaptive optics infraRed Camera and Spectrograph) and dual-deformable mirror adaptive optics (AO) system (ShaneAO). We present…

Astronomical telescopes suffer from a tradeoff between field of view (FoV) and image resolution: increasing the FoV leads to an optical field that is under-sampled by the science camera. This work presents a novel computational imaging…

Ground-based telescopes have been playing a leading role in exoplanet direct imaging science and technological development for the past two decades and will continue to have an indispensable role for the next decade and beyond. Extreme…

We report on an investigation of the SBS 1520+530 gravitational lens system and its environment using archival HST imaging, Keck spectroscopic data, and Keck adaptive-optics imaging. The AO imaging has allowed us to fix the lens galaxy…

Adaptive Optics at mid-IR wavelengths has long been seen as either not necessary or easy. The impact of atmospheric turbulence on the performance of 8-10 meter class telescopes in the mid-IR is relatively small compared to other performance…

Large area surveys will dominate the forthcoming decades of astronomy and their success requires characterizing thousands of discoveries through additional observations at higher spatial or spectral resolution, and at complementary cadences…

Large telescope's adaptive optics (AO) system requires one or several bright artificial laser guide stars to improve its sky coverage. The recent advent of high power sodium laser is perfect for such application. However, besides the output…

Robo-AO is the first autonomous laser adaptive optics system and science instrument operating on sky. With minimal human oversight, the system robotically executes large scale surveys, monitors long-term astrophysical dynamics and…

Accurate and precise measurements of the Hubble constant are critical for testing our current standard cosmological model and revealing possibly new physics. With Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging, each strong gravitational lens system…

The next generation of large ground-based optical and infrared telescopes will provide new challenges for designers of astronomical instrumentation. The varied science cases for these extremely large telescopes (ELTs) require a large range…

Adaptive optics laser guide star systems perform atmospheric correction of stellar wavefronts in two parts: stellar tip-tilt and high-spatial-order laser-correction. The requirement of a sufficiently bright guide star in the field-of-view…

The scientific impacts of telescopes worldwide have been compared on the basis of their contributions to (a) the 1000 most-cited astronomy papers published 1991-8 (125 from each year), and (b) the 452 astronomy papers published in Nature…

In this paper we present the Adaptive Optics Lucky Imager (AOLI), a state-of-the-art instrument which makes use of two well proved techniques for extremely high spatial resolution with ground-based telescopes: Lucky Imaging (LI) and…

This project is focused on evaluating the slowly-varying ground layer seeing component at the optical telescopes of ARIES. To achieve this, we assembled the instrument, consisting of a filter wheel, a CCD camera, and a tip-tilt enabled…

The second data release of ESA's Gaia satellite (Gaia DR2) revolutionised astronomy by providing accurate distances, proper motions, apparent magnitudes, and in many cases temperatures and radial velocities for an unprecedented number of…

The laser-tracked geodetic satellites LAGEOS, LAGEOS II and LARES are currently employed, among other things, to measure the general relativistic Lense-Thirring effect in the gravitomagnetic field of the spinning Earth with the hope of…