CCAO-Cam: A Remote-Access, Dual-Band (Optical/NIR) Adaptive Optics System for the Table Mountain 1-meter telescope

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Telescopes on the ground must observe objects in deep space through the interference of the earth's atmosphere. As light passes through the atmosphere it gets spread out by turbulence due to wind shear and changes in temperature and pressure within the atmospheric layers. These effects reduce the resolving power of earth-based telescopes. This difficulty can be overcome to a large extent by monitoring a bright star near the object of interest and looking for the rapidly varying distortions and displacements of the star's image that are introduced as its light passes through the atmosphere. These "guide star" signals are fed into an Adaptive Optics (AO) system that uses a "wavefront sensor" and a "deformable mirror" to restore the image to (nearly) what would be seen from above the atmosphere. Unfortunately, AO systems are very complex, expensive, and require considerable expertise to maintain and operate. Because of these factors, AO is currently limited to large telescopes. There are many interesting astronomical programs that would benefit from the higher resolution imaging capabilities enabled by AO, but only a handful of large telescopes currently have such systems. Dr. Philip Choi, an Assistant Professor and astronomer at Pomona College in California, is pursuing an idea to develop a low-cost AO system specifically for modest sized telescopes. He will build it and install it on the 1-meter telescope at JPL's Table Mountain Observatory. The telescope is owned and operated by Pomona and Harvey Mudd Colleges and the AO instrumentation will make high-resolution imaging available for student training and faculty and student research at Pomona College, Harvey Mudd College, and Sonoma State University.