Related papers: Characterizing deformable mirrors for the MagAO-X …
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…
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…
The Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) is an integral field spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope Unit Telescope 4, capable of laser guide star assisted and tomographic adaptive optics using the GALACSI module. Its observing…
The direct detection and imaging of exoplanets requires the use of high-contrast adaptive optics (AO). In these systems quasi-static aberrations need to be highly corrected and calibrated. In order to achieve this, the pupil-modulated…
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) offers an opportunity to stabilize an image and maximize the spatial resolution achievable by ground based telescopes by removing the distortions due to the atmosphere. Typically, the deformable mirror in an AO system…
We have built a 45-cm long x-ray deformable mirror of super-polished single-crystal silicon that has 45 actuators along the tangential axis. After assembly the surface height error was 19 nm rms. With use of high-precision visible-light…
Multifocal plane microscopy (MUM) allows three dimensional objects to be imaged in a single camera frame. Our approach uses dual orthogonal diffraction phase gratings with a quadratic distortion of the lines to apply defocus to the first…
Rather than using an adaptive optics (AO) system to correct a telescope s entire pupil, it can instead be used to more finely correct a smaller sub-aperture. Indeed, existing AO systems can be used to correct a sub-aperture 1/3 to 1/2 the…
The aberrations induced by the sample and/or by the sample holder limit the resolution of optical microscopes. Wavefront correction can be achieved using a deformable mirror with wavefront sensorless optimization algorithms but, despite the…
For sufficiently wide ranges of applied control signals (control voltages), MEMS and piezoelectric Deformable Mirrors (DMs), exhibit nonlinear behavior. The nonlinear behavior manifests itself in nonlinear actuator couplings, nonlinear…
We present a new class of magnetically shaped deformable liquid mirrors made of a magnetic liquid (ferrofluid). Deformable liquid mirrors offer advantages with respect to deformable solid mirrors: large deformations, low costs and the…
We present a superpixel method for full spatial phase and amplitude control of a light beam using a digital micromirror device (DMD) combined with a spatial filter. We combine square regions of nearby micromirrors into superpixels by low…
Deformable mirrors are increasingly used in astronomy. However, they still are limited in stroke for active correction of high amplitude optical aberrations. Magnetic Liquid deformable mirrors (MLDMs) are a new technology that has…
The Astro2020 decadal survey recommended an infrared, optical, ultra-violet (IR/O/UV) telescope with a $\sim$6~m inscribed diameter and equipped with a coronagraph instrument to directly image exoEarths in the habitable zone of their host…
We report on the design of an all-mirror wavefront-division interferometer capable of spectroscopic studies across multiple spectral ranges$\unicode{x2013}$from the plasma frequencies of metals to terahertz wavelengths and beyond. The…
Extreme adaptive optics (AO) is crucial for enabling the contrasts needed for ground-based high contrast imaging instruments to detect exoplanets. Pushing exoplanet imaging detection sensitivities towards lower mass, closer separations, and…
MICADO is the adaptive optics imaging camera for the E-ELT. It has been designed and optimised to be mounted to the LGS-MCAO system MAORY, and will provide diffraction limited imaging over a wide (about 1 arcmin) field of view. For initial…
Vast tunable optical components are realized based on dynamic reconfigurations of the incident wavefronts, such as beam steering and tunable lens. However, the dominant paradigm of current wavefront reconfiguration technologies relies on…
The limits for adaptive-optics (AO) imaging at high contrast and high resolution are determined by residual phase errors from non-common-path aberrations not sensed by the wavefront sensor, especially for integral field spectrographs, where…