New vistas in Adaptive Optics

http://spie.org/AS - SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation Symposium

From the domain of large telescopes and military applications, adaptive optics technology is poised to spread to new applications.

In use on large telescopes only since the 1990s, adaptive optics is now considered almost indispensible for imaging distant objects. The technology is developing rapidly and will soon expand into the next generation of large telescopes. Meanwhile, work is underway to apply AO concepts to other areas.

The famous 200-inch Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar, California, installed adaptive optics in 1999. The 241-actuator system will soon be upgraded with the PALM-3000, an "extreme adaptive optics" system with 3,388 actuators. Researchers predict the system will allow the Hale Telescope to equal the performance of a 5-meter telescope in space.

A more recent development in adaptive optics for telescopes is the laser guide star, which acts as a wavefront reference source when bright enough stars are not present in a region of the sky.

The Palomar Observatory is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology.

Robert Tyson, professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of five books on adaptive optics, introduces the topic and explains the laser guide star in this video. Implementation of the adaptive optics upgrade to the Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar is discussed by two researchers from Caltech, Antonin Bouchez and Christoph Baranec.

Category:

Science & Technology

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• SPIE
• photonics
• optics
• astronomy
• space
• telescopes
• lasers
• adaptive optics
• Palomar
• technology