Related papers: The Simultaneous Operation of a Controllable Segme…

Adaptive optics (AO) is a technique to improve the resolution of ground-based telescopes by correcting, in real-time, optical aberrations due to atmospheric turbulence and the telescope itself. With the rise of Giant Segmented Mirror…

The behavior of an adaptive optics (AO) system for ground-based high contrast imaging (HCI) dictates the achievable contrast of the instrument. In conditions where the coherence time of the atmosphere is short compared to the speed of the…

Due to turbulence in the atmosphere images taken from ground-based telescopes become distorted. With adaptive optics (AO) images can be given greater clarity allowing for better observations with existing telescopes and are essential for…

Current and future high contrast imaging instruments aim to detect exoplanets at closer orbital separations, lower masses, and/or older ages than their predecessors. However, continually evolving speckles in the coronagraphic science image…

Over the past decade, the high-contrast observation of disks and gas giant planets around nearby stars has been made possible on ground-based instruments using extreme adaptive optics (XAO). While these facilities produce images with a…

The pyramid wavefront sensor (P-WFS) has replaced the Shack-Hartmann (SH-) WFS as sensor of choice for high performance adaptive optics (AO) systems in astronomy because of its flexibility in pupil sampling, its dynamic range, and its…

The availability and performance of laser-based adaptive optics (AO) systems are strongly dependent on the power and quality of the laser beam before being projected to the sky. Frequent and time-consuming alignment procedures are usually…

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…

As we enter the era of TESS and JWST, instrumentation that can carry out radial velocity measurements of exoplanet systems is in high demand. We will address this demand by upgrading the UC Lick Observatory's 2.4-meter Automated Planet…

We present the results obtained with an end-to-end simulator of an Extreme Adaptive Optics (XAO) system control loop. It is used to predict its on-sky performances and to optimise the AO loop algorithms. It was first used to validate a…

Recent advances in adaptive optics (AO) have led to the implementation of wide field-of-view AO systems. A number of wide-field AO systems are also planned for the forthcoming Extremely Large Telescopes. Such systems have multiple wavefront…

Commonly used wavefront sensors, the Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor and the pyramid wavefront sensor, for example, have large dynamic range or high sensitivity, trading one regime for the other. A new type of wavefront sensor is being…

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…

Wavefront sensing in solar adaptive-optics is currently done with correlating Shack-Hartmann sensors, although the spatial- and temporal-resolutions of the phase measurements are then limited by the extremely fast computing required to…

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…

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…

Astronomical adaptive optics (AO) is a critical approach to enable ground-based diffraction-limited imaging and high contrast science, with the potential to enable habitable exoplanet imaging on future extremely large telescopes. However,…

We present the last results of our PSF reconstruction (PSF-R) project for the Keck-II and Gemini-North AO systems in natural guide star mode. Our initial tests have shown that the most critical aspects of PSF-R are the determination of the…

We discuss the chosen concepts, detailed design, implementation and calibration of the 85-electrode adaptive optics (AO) system of the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope (SST), which was installed in 2013. The AO system is unusual by using a…

Atmospheric turbulence causes fluctuations in the local refractive index of air that accumulatively disturb a wave's phase and amplitude distribution as it propagates. This impairs the effective range of laser weapons as well as the…