Adaptive Optics for Advanced Astrophysical Instrumentation

用于先进天体物理仪器的自适应光学

• 批准号: RGPIN-2015-04905
• 负责人: Bradley, Colin
• 金额: $ 3.06万
• 依托单位: University of Victoria
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2017-01-01 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=633027
• 关键词: Adaptive; Optics; Advanced; Astrophysical; Instrumentation

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.

自适应光学（AO）装备的望远镜通过监测大气不断变化的湍流，然后“适应”光学系统进行补偿，消除了由大气湍流引起的光学模糊。通过对可变形镜的快速控制实现的这些调整，极大地提高了最终图像的分辨率，并使大型地面望远镜达到了分辨率极限，这比哈勃太空望远镜的分辨率好很多很多倍。早期的AO系统在有限的视场（FOV）上提供校正，在一侧只有几十角秒。虽然它适用于一些天文研究，但它限制了对较大天体（如星系）的研究。宽视场AO系统在更大的视场上产生校正。目前的想法倾向于在将信号分配到仪器之前对整个视场进行适度校正的多共轭AO （MCAO）和在仪器内应用的多目标AO (MOAO)，以提供围绕多个科学目标的精确校正。