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Almost all current and future high-contrast imaging instruments will use a Pyramid wavefront sensor (PWFS) as a primary or secondary wavefront sensor. The main issue with the PWFS is its nonlinear response to large phase aberrations,…

The TP3-WFS (Two Pupil Plane Positions Wavefront Sensor) is, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first physical implementation of the geometrical wavefront reconstruction algorithm that has been tested in a telescope as part of an…

The search for exoplanets is pushing adaptive optics systems on ground-based telescopes to their limits. One of the major limitations at small angular separations, exactly where exoplanets are predicted to be, is the servo-lag of the…

Resolving fine details of astronomical objects provides critical insights into their underlying physical processes. This drives in part the desire to construct ever-larger telescopes and interferometer arrays and to observe at shorter…

Over the past fifty years, wavefront sensing technology has continuously evolved from basic techniques to high-precision systems, serving as a core methodology in adaptive optics (AO). Beyond traditional wavefront retrieval methods based on…

The next generation of ground-based instruments aims to break through the knowledge we have on exoplanets by imaging circumstellar environments always closer to the stars. However, direct imaging requires an AO system and high-contrast…

Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors for both solar and laser guide star adaptive optics (with elongated spots) need to observe extended objects. Correlation techniques have been successfully employed to measure the wavefront gradient in solar…

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…

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…

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…

We propose a new type of Wave Front Sensor (WFS) derived from the Pyramid WFS (PWFS). This new WFS, called the Flattened Pyramid-WFS (FPWFS), has a reduced Pyramid angle in order to optically overlap the four pupil images into an unique…

Extremely Large Telescopes have overwhelmingly opted for the Pyramid wavefront sensor (PyWFS) over the more widely used Shack-Hartmann WaveFront Sensor (SHWFS) to perform their Single Conjugate Adaptive Optics (SCAO) mode. The PyWFS, a…

SAXO+ is a planned enhancement of the existing SAXO, the VLT/ SPHERE adaptive optics system, deployed on ESO's Very Large Telescope. This upgrade is designed to significantly enhance the instrument's capacity to detect and analyze young…

Advanced adaptive optics (AO) instruments on ground-based telescopes require accurate knowledge of the atmospheric turbulence strength as a function of altitude. This information assists point spread function reconstruction, AO temporal…

The point-spread function (PSF) of an adaptive optics (AO) system is often poorly known. This ignorance can lead to significant systematic errors in photometry. Since the degree of AO correction is sensitive to the observing conditions:…

With the Extremely Large Telescope-generation telescopes come new challenges. The complexity of these telescopes' pupil creates new problems for Adaptive Optics. In particular, the large spiders necessary to support the massive optics of…

For ExAO instruments for the Giant Segmented Mirror Telescopes (GSMTs), alternative architectures of WFS are under consideration because there is a tradeoff between detector size, speed, and noise that reduces the performance of GSMT-ExAO…

The MMT Adaptive Optics exoPlanet Characterization System (MAPS) is a comprehensive update to the first generation MMT adaptive optics system (MMTAO), designed to produce a facility class suite of instruments whose purpose is to image…

Strong turbulence conditions create amplitude aberrations through the effects of near-field diffraction. When integrated over long optical path lengths, amplitude aberrations (seen as scintillation) can nullify local areas in the recorded…

Adaptive Optics (AO) is an innovative technique that substantially improves the optical performance of ground-based telescopes. The SOAR Adaptive Module (SAM) is a laser-assisted AO instrument, designed to compensate ground-layer…