Related papers: ARGOS at the LBT. Binocular laser guided ground la…
ARGOS is the laser guide star ground layer adaptive optics system of the LBT. ARGOS is designed to bring a moderate but uniform reduction of the PSF size over a FoV as large as 4x4arcmin, allowing a significative increase of the science…
Gravitationally lensed systems allow a detailed view of galaxies at high redshift. High spatial- and spectral-resolution measurements of arc-like structures can offer unique constraints on the physical and dynamical properties of high-z…
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…
The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) is a unique telescope featuring two co-mounted optical trains with 8.4m primary mirrors. The telescope Adaptive Optics (AO) system uses two innovative key components, namely an adaptive secondary mirror…
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…
As new large-scale astronomical surveys greatly increase the number of objects targeted and discoveries made, the requirement for efficient follow-up observations is crucial. Adaptive optics imaging, which compensates for the image-blurring…
The performance of an adaptive optics (AO) system on a 100m diameter ground based telescope working in the visible range of the spectrum is computed using an analytical approach. The target Strehl ratio of 60% is achieved at 0.5um with a…
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…
Ground-layer adaptive optics (GLAO) systems offer the possibility of improving the "seeing" of large ground-based telescopes and increasing the efficiency and sensitivity of observations over a wide field-of-view. We explore the utility and…
Using five independent analytic and Monte Carlo simulation codes, we have studied the performance of wide field ground layer adaptive optics (GLAO), which can use a single, relatively low order deformable mirror to correct the wavefront…
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…
Adaptive optics (AO) systems allow a telescope to reach its diffraction limit at near infrared wavelengths. But to achieve this, a bright natural guide star (NGS) is needed for the wavefront sensing, severely limiting the fraction of 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…
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…
GRAVITY+ improves by orders of magnitude the sensitivity, sky-coverage and contrast of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). A central part of this project is the development of Gravity Plus Adaptive Optics (GPAO), a dedicated…
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…
Traditional wavefront control in high-energy, high-intensity laser systems usually lacks real-time capability, failing to address dynamic aberrations. This limits experimental accuracy due to shot-to-shot fluctuations and necessitates long…
The recent advent of laser guide star adaptive optics (LGS AO) on the largest ground-based telescopes has enabled a wide range of high angular resolution science, previously infeasible from ground-based and/or space-based observatories. As…
The Laser Guide Star Facility for the VLT will be commissioned during 2003. This, of course, can only be the first step towards enhancing the scientific output of the VLT through adaptive optics. So in this contribution we propose the…
First multi-conjugate adaptive-optical (MCAO) systems are currently being installed on solar telescopes. The aim of these systems is to increase the corrected field-of-view with respect to conventional adaptive optics. However, this first…