Related papers: KAPAO: a MEMS-based natural guide star adaptive op…

Exoplanet detection and characterization through extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) is a key science goal of future extremely large telescopes. This achievement, however, will be limited in sensitivity by both quasi-static wavefront errors and…

Preference optimization is a critical post-training technique used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, typically by fine-tuning on ranked response pairs. While methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have…

Astronomical adaptive optics systems are used to increase effective telescope resolution. However, they cannot be used to observe the whole sky since one or more natural guide stars of sufficient brightness must be found within the…

We present the results of an adaptive optics survey for faint companions among Galactic O-type star systems (V < 8) using the Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) 3.6-meter telescope on Haleakala. We surveyed these O star systems in…

The next generation of extreme adaptive optics (AO) must be calibrated exceptionally well to achieve the desired contrast for ground-based direct imaging exoplanet targets. Current wavefront sensing and control system responses deviate from…

We present a status update for MagAO-X, a 2000 actuator, 3.6 kHz adaptive optics and coronagraph system for the Magellan Clay 6.5 m telescope. MagAO-X is optimized for high contrast imaging at visible wavelengths. Our primary science goals…

Transformation optics (TO) has been used to propose various novel optical devices. With the help of metamaterials, several intriguing designs, such as invisibility cloaks, have been implemented. However, as the basic units should be much…

In this paper, we are going to introduce the Kottamia Astronomical Observatory, KAO, to the astronomical community. The current status of the telescope together with the available instrumentations is described. An upgrade stage including a…

Adaptive optical correction is an efficient technique to obtain high-resolution images of the retinal surface. A main limitation of adaptive optical correction, however, is the small size of the corrected image. For medical purposes it is…

We summarize the theory of coronagraphic optics, and identify a dimensionless fine-tuning parameter, F, which we use to describe the Lyot stop size in the natural units of the coronagraphic optical train and the observing wavelength. We…

We describe and report first results from PALM-3000, the second-generation astronomical adaptive optics facility for the 5.1-m Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory. PALM-3000 has been engineered for high-contrast imaging and emission…

A new high-order adaptive optics system is now being commissioned at the Lick Observatory Shane 3-meter telescope in California. This system uses a high return efficiency sodium beacon and a combination of low and high-order deformable…

Adaptive optics (AO) have been used to correct wavefronts to achieve diffraction limited point spread functions in a broad range of optical applications, prominently ground-based astronomical telescopes operating in near infra-red. While…

Robo-AO is the first automated laser adaptive optics instrument. In just its second year of scientific operations, it has completed the largest adaptive optics surveys to date, each comprising thousands of targets. Robo-AO uses a fully…

A new era of ground-based observations, either in the infrared with the next-generation of 25-40m extremely large telescopes or in the visible with the 8m Very Large Telescope, is going to be assisted by multi-conjugate adaptive optics…

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…

`Imaka is a ground layer adaptive optics (GLAO) demonstrator on the University of Hawaii 2.2m telescope with a 24'x18' field-of-view, nearly an order of magnitude larger than previous AO instruments. In 15 nights of observing with natural…

The Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory (CAMO) mirror tracking system has been in operation since 2009 and has, to date, produced more than 20,000 two-station meteor observations at meter-level spatial and 10 ms temporal resolution. In…

Aligning large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning via reinforcement learning is often hampered by the limitations of existing policy optimization algorithms, such as static training schedules and the rigid, uniform…

A multi-object spectrograph on the forthcoming European Extremely Large Telescope will be required to operate with good sky coverage. Many of the interesting deep cosmological fields were deliberately chosen to be free of bright foreground…