Related papers: High-resolution imaging at the SOAR telescope
Use of the highly sensitive Hokupa'a/Gemini curvature wavefront sensor has allowed for the first time direct adaptive optics (AO) guiding on M8-M9 very low mass (VLM) stars. An initial survey of 20 such objects (SpT=M8-M9) discovered 4…
The Southern Robotic Adaptive Optics (SRAO) instrument will bring the proven high-efficiency capabilities of Robo-AO to the Southern-Hemisphere, providing the unique capability to image with high-angular-resolution thousands of targets per…
We obtained Halpha diffraction limited data of the LBV star P Cyg using the ONERA Adaptive Optics (AO) facility BOA at the OHP 1.52m telescope on October 1997. Taking P Cyg and the reference star 59 Cyg AO long exposures we find that P Cyg…
Atmospheric turbulence is an important limit to high angular resolution in astronomy. Interferometry resolved this issue by filtering the incoming light with single-mode fibers. Thanks to this technique, we obtained with the IOTA…
The efficiency of the management of top-class ground-based astronomical facilities supported by Adaptive Optics (AO) relies on our ability to forecast the optical turbulence (OT) and a set of relevant atmospheric parameters. Indeed, in…
We study the impact of the atmospheric differential chromatic refraction on the measurements and precision of relative astrometry. Specifically, we address the problem of measuring the separations of close pairs of binary stars with…
Images obtained by microscopes are generally degraded by aberrations. Adaptive optics (AO) has been widely used in to compensate for aberrations and improve reduced image quality. Requiring no separate wavefront sensor, sensorless AO…
A technique is described for the detection and measurement of close binary systems whose images are unresolved. The method is based on analysis of the moment of inertia tensor of the image, from which the product of the binary flux ratio…
Astronomers usually need the highest angular resolution possible, but the blurring effect of diffraction imposes a fundamental limit on the image quality from any single telescope. Interferometry allows light collected at widely-separated…
Ground-based adaptive optics (AO) in the infrared has made exceptional advances in approaching space-like image quality at higher collecting area. Optical-wavelength applications are now also growing in scope. We therefore provide here a…
Laser guide stars with adaptive optics allow astronomical image correction in the absence of a natural guide star. Single guide star systems with a star created in the earth's sodium layer can be used to correct the wavefront in the near…
Ground-based solar observations are severely affected by Earth's turbulent atmosphere. As a consequence, observed image quality and prevailing seeing conditions are closely related. Partial correction of image degradation is nowadays…
The spectral resolution of a dispersive spectrograph is dependent on the width of the entrance slit. This means that astronomical spectrographs trade-off throughput with spectral resolving power. Recently, optical guided-wave transitions…
We have built and tested a compact, low-cost, but very-high-performance astronomical polarimeter based on a continuously rotating half-wave plate and a high-speed imaging detector. The polarimeter is suitable for small telescopes up to ~1 m…
The Planetary Systems Imager (PSI) is a proposed instrument for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) that provides an extreme adaptive optics (AO) correction to a multi-wavelength instrument suite optimized for high contrast science. PSI's…
The Adaptive Optics Lucky Imager (AOLI) is a new instrument under development to demonstrate near diffraction limited imaging in the visible on large ground-based telescopes. We present the adaptive optics system being designed for the…
Observational tests of ground layer wavefront recovery have been made in open loop using a constellation of four natural guide stars at the 1.55 m Kuiper telescope in Arizona. Such tests explore the effectiveness of wide-field seeing…
It is well known that the solar gravitational field can be considered as a telescope with a prime focus at locations beyond 550 au. In this work we present a new derivation of the wave-optical properties of the system, by adapting the…
New high-resolution adaptive optics systems provide an unprecedentedly detailed view of nearby star forming regions. In particular, young nearby T Tauri stars can be probed at much smaller physical scales (a few AU) than possible just a…
We present the results of adaptive-optics imaging of 12 (z < 0.6) quasars in the H and K bands using the PUEO system mounted on the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope. The QSOs (m_V > 15.0) themselves are used as reference for the correction.…