Related papers: Low Order Adaptive Optics with Very Faint Referenc…
We use a Lucky Imaging system to obtain I-band images with much improved angular resolution on a ground-based 2.5m telescope. We present results from a 10-night assessment campaign on the 2.56m Nordic Optical Telescope and quantify the…
The sodium laser guide star adaptive optics system ALFA, which is installed at the Calar Alto 3.5-m telescope, has been undergoing an intensive optimisation phase. Observations using natural guide stars that are presented in this paper,…
Over the last few years increasing consideration has been given to the study of Laser Guide Stars (LGS) for the measurement of the disturbance introduced by the atmosphere in optical and near-infrared astronomical observations from the…
Adaptive Optics is a prime example of how progress in observational astronomy can be driven by technological developments. At many observatories it is now considered to be part of a standard instrumentation suite, enabling ground-based…
Adaptive optics (AO) is a powerful image correction technique with proven benefits for many life-science microscopy methods. However, the complexity of adding a reflective wavefront modulator and a wavefront sensor into already complicated…
Continuous wavefront sensing on future space telescopes allows relaxation of stability requirements while still allowing on-orbit diffraction-limited optical performance. We consider the suitability of phase retrieval to continuously…
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…
Imaging faint objects, such as exoplanets or disks, around nearby stars is extremely challenging because host star images are dominated by the telescope diffraction pattern. Using a coronagraph is an efficient solution for removing…
Large ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics (AO) systems have ushered in a new era of high-resolution infrared photometry and astrometry. Relative astrometric accuracies of <0.2 mas have already been demonstrated from…
Large area surveys will dominate the next decade of astronomy, and the main limitation to science will be the thorough followup and characterization of their extremely numerous discoveries. The deployment of robotic laser adaptive optics on…
The combination of Lucky Imaging with a low order adaptive optics system was demonstrated very successfully on the Palomar 5m telescope nearly 10 years ago. It is still the only system to give such high-resolution images in the visible or…
Over the past ten years, the concept of adaptive optics has evolved from early experimental stages to a standard observing tool now available at almost all major optical and near-infrared telescope facilities. Adaptive optics will also be…
The importance of laser guide stars to the practical usefulness of adaptive optics cannot be understated, and yet there are very few working systems. This contribution discusses the current status of the ALFA laser guide star, with regard…
Astrometric calibration of images with a small field of view is often inferior to the internal accuracy of the source detections due to the small number of accessible guide stars. One important experiment with such challenges is the Hubble…
We provide a technique for resolving intermediate-separation binaries stars with medium-sized telescopes (i.e. diameter less than or equal to 2.5 m) at wavelengths around 825 nm in the super-resolution range (i.e. below the limit defined by…
In various fields of physics and astronomy, access to experimental facilities or to telescopes is becoming more and more competitive and limited. It becomes therefore important to optimize the type of measurements and their scheduling to…
Bright single and binary stars were observed at the 4.1-m telescope with a fast electron-multiplication camera in the regime of partial turbulence correction by the visible-light adaptive optics system. We compare the angular resolution…
The availability of a robust and efficient routine for calculating light curves of a finite source magnified due to bending its light by the gravitational field of an intervening binary lens is essential for determining the characteristics…
Strong gravitational lensing is a powerful probe of the distribution of matter on sub-kpc scales. It can be used to test the existence of completely dark subhalos surrounding galaxies, as predicted by the standard cold dark matter model, or…
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…