Adaptive Optics for Advanced Astrophysical Instrumentation

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Adaptive Optics (AO) equipped telescopes eliminate the optical blur, due to atmospheric turbulence, by monitoring the atmosphere’s ever-changing turbulence and then “adapting” the optical system to compensate. These adaptations, achieved through the fast control of deformable mirrors, dramatically improve the resolution of the final image and allow large ground-based telescopes to reach their resolution limit, which is many many times better than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. Early AO systems provided correction on a limited field of view (FOV), only a few tens of arcseconds on a side. While suitable for some astronomical inquiries it curtailed studies of larger objects, such as galaxies. Wide field AO systems produce corrections over a much larger FOV. Current thinking favours multi-conjugate AO (MCAO) for moderately correcting the entire FOV prior to distributing the signal to an instrument and multi-object AO (MOAO) for application within an instrument to provide exquisite correction around multiple scientific targets.