Advanced Instrumentation for Astronomy

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The adaptive optics (AO) laboratory, at the University of Victoria, is a participant (since 2005) in a world-class research program; the thirty meter telescope (TMT) project. The TMT project is a partnership, between Canada and the USA, to design and build the next generation, ground-based optical telescope. The US partners are comprised of Caltech, the Moore Foundation and the University of California. The Canadian partners are the National Research Council and ACURA (Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy). The rationale for an AO system, coupled to a ground-based telescope, is to remove the image aberrations created when light, from a distant object, passes through the earth's atmosphere. For very large optical telescopes, adaptive optics is an essential component. The key components in an AO system are the: wave-front sensor (WFS) that detects the optical aberration; deformable mirror (DM) that changes shape to remove the aberration; and, a real-time control system that optimally adjusts the actuators, of the deformable mirror, in response to the wavefront sensor data. For a massive instrument, such as TMT, there is no single deformable mirror technology that can provide a sufficiently large number of actuators (order of thousands) that each has a large enough stroke (tens of microns). Therefore, the UVic laboratory is investigating an AO concept consisting of two deformable mirrors (DMs) working cooperatively.