Related papers: Natural guide-star processing for wide-field laser…
Adaptive optics (AO) systems are crucial for high-resolution astronomical observations by compensating for atmospheric turbulence. While laser guide stars (LGS) address high-order wavefront aberrations, natural guide stars (NGS) remain…
Measurement of the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background is most often based on a spherical harmonic analysis of the observed temperature anisotropies. Even if all-sky maps are obtained, however, it is likely that the…
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 High Angular Resolution Monolithic Optical and Near-infrared Integral field spectrograph (HARMONI) is the visible and near-infrared (NIR), adaptive-optics-assisted, integral field spectrograph for ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).…
EAGLE is the multi-object, spatially-resolved, near-IR spectrograph instrument concept for the E-ELT, relying on a distributed Adaptive Optics, so-called Multi Object Adaptive Optics. This paper presents the results of a phase A study.…
This paper presents a new strategy for observing faint galaxies with high order natural guide star systems. We have imaged 5 high galactic latitude fields within the isoplanatic patch of bright stars (8.5 < R < 10.3 mag). The fields provide…
We present an analytical model of a single natural guide star astronomical adaptive optics system, in closed loop mode. The model is used to simulate the long exposure system point spread function, using the spatial frequency (or Fourier)…
Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics systems based on sodium Laser Guide Stars may exploit Natural Guide Stars to solve intrinsic limitations of artificial beacons (tip-tilt indetermination and anisoplanatism) and to mitigate the impact of the…
Most current astronomical adaptive optics (AO) systems rely on the availability of a bright star to measure the distortion of the incoming wavefront. Replacing the guide star with an artificial laser beacon alleviates this dependency on…
We describe results from the first astronomical adaptive optics system to use multiple laser guide stars, located at the 6.5-m MMT telescope in Arizona. Its initial operational mode, ground-layer adaptive optics (GLAO), provides uniform…
Exoplanet imaging has thus far enabled studies of wide-orbit ($>$10 AU) giant planet ($>$2 Jupiter masses) formation and giant planet atmospheres, with future 30 meter-class Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) needed to image and characterize…
One important frontier for astronomical adaptive optics (AO) involves methods such as Multi-Object AO and Multi-Conjugate AO that have the potential to give a significantly larger field of view than conventional AO techniques. A second key…
Future large space telescopes will be equipped with adaptive optics (AO) to overcome wavefront aberrations and achieve high contrast for imaging faint astronomical objects, such as earth-like exoplanets and debris disks. In contrast to AO…
The Max-Planck institutes for astronomy (MPIA) and for extraterrestrial physics (MPE) run an adaptive optics (AO) system with a laser guide star at the 3.5 m telescope on Calar Alto, Spain. This system, called ALFA, produces now scientific…
Full sky coverage Adaptive Optics on Extremely Large Telescopes requires the adoption of several Laser Guide Stars as references.With such large apertures, the apparent elongation of the beacons is absolutely significant.With few…
Astronomical adaptive optics systems with open-loop deformable mirror control have recently come on-line. In these systems, the deformable mirror surface is not included in the wavefront sensor paths, and so changes made to the deformable…
Optical interferometry has been successful at achieving milliarcsecond resolution on bright stars. Imaging performance can improve greatly by increasing the number of baselines, which has motivated proposals to build large (~ 100 m) optical…
Several astronomical surveys aimed at the investigation of the extragalactic components were carried out in order to map systematically the universe and its constituents. An excellent level of detail is needed, and it is possible only using…
It is widely believed that adaptive optics only has a role in correcting turbulent wavefronts on large telescopes using very bright reference stars. Unfortunately these are very scarce and many astronomical targets require wavefront…
We review the science case for the Laser Guide Star system being built for the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) on La Palma. When used in combination with the NAOMI Adaptive Optics system and the OASIS visible-wavelength Integral Field…