Related papers: Characterizing the Adaptive Optics Off-Axis Point-…
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…
Images from adaptive optics systems are generally affected by significant distortions of the point spread function (PSF) across the field of view, depending on the position of natural and artificial guide stars. Image reduction techniques…
Adaptive optics is a technique mostly used on large telescopes. It turns out to be challenging for smaller telescopes (0.5~2m) due to the small isoplanatic angle, small subapertures and high correction speeds needed at visible wavelengths,…
The Adaptive Optics (AO) performance significantly depends on the available Natural Guide Stars (NGSs) and a wide range of atmospheric conditions (seeing, Cn2, windspeed,...). In order to be able to easily predict the AO performance, we…
Accurate and precise measurements of the Hubble constant are critical for testing our current standard cosmological model and revealing possibly new physics. With Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging, each strong gravitational lens system…
In this paper we present the approach we have used to determine and account for the anisoplanatic point spread function (PSF) in deep adaptive optics (AO) images for the Survey of a Wide Area with NACO (SWAN) at the ESO VLT. The survey…
We propose a complete framework for the detection, astrometry, and photometry of faint companions from a sequence of adaptive optics corrected short exposures. The algorithms exploit the difference in statistics between the on-axis and…
Modern Giant Segmented Mirror Telescopes (GSMTs) like the Extremely Large Telescope, which is currently under construction, depend heavily on Adaptive Optics (AO) systems to correct for atmospheric distortions. However, a residual blur…
We briefly discuss the past, present, and future state of astronomical science with laser guide star adaptive optics (LGS AO). We present a tabulation of refereed science papers from LGS AO, amounting to a total of 23 publications as of May…
One of the major limitations of adaptive optics (AO) corrected image post-processing is the lack of knowledge on the system point spread function (PSF). The PSF is not always available as a direct imaging on isolated point like objects such…
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…
Optical interferometry has been successful at achieving milliarcsecond resolution on bright stars. Imaging performance can improve greatly by increasing the number of baselines, which has motivated proposals to build large (~ 100 m) optical…
Context . Initially designed to detect and characterise exoplanets, extreme adaptive optics (AO) systems open a new window onto the Solar System by resolving its small bodies. Nonetheless, their study remains limited by the accuracy of the…
We present an analytical model of a single natural guide star astronomical adaptive optics system, in closed loop mode. The model is used to simulate the long exposure system point spread function, using the spatial frequency (or Fourier)…
The optimal performance of adaptive optics systems can only be maintained if the wavefront reference is bright and compact. Experience has shown that both of these important criteria are remarkably difficult to achieve with laser guide…
We describe several projects addressing the growth of galaxies and massive black holes, for which adaptive optics is mandatory to reach high spatial resolution but is also a challenge due to the lack of guide stars and long integrations. In…
Initially designed to detect and characterize exoplanets, extreme adaptive optics systems (AO) open a new window on the solar system by resolving its small bodies. Nonetheless, despite the always increasing performances of AO systems, the…
Both lucky imaging techniques and adaptive optics require natural guide stars, limiting sky coverage, even when laser guide stars are used. Lucky imaging techniques become less successful on larger telescopes unless adaptive optics is used,…
From natural guide star adaptive optics data taken with the Come-On Plus and with the Starfire Optical Range Generation II instruments in the JHK bands and in the I band respectively, we describe and analyse the point spread function. The…
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…