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

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案(公法111-5)资助的。地面望远镜必须通过地球大气层的干扰来观测深空物体。当光穿过大气层时，由于风的切变以及大气层内温度和压力的变化，它被湍流传播开来。这些效应降低了地面望远镜的分辨率。这一困难在很大程度上可以通过监测感兴趣物体附近的明亮恒星，并寻找当其光线通过大气层时引入的恒星图像的快速变化的扭曲和位移来克服。这些“引导星”信号被送入自适应光学(AO)系统，该系统使用“波前传感器”和“可变形镜”来将图像恢复到(几乎)从大气层上方所能看到的状态。不幸的是，AO系统非常复杂、昂贵，并且需要相当多的专业知识来维护和操作。由于这些因素，目前AO仅限于大型望远镜。有许多有趣的天文项目将受益于AO带来的更高分辨率的成像能力，但目前只有少数大型望远镜有这样的系统。加州波莫纳学院的助理教授兼天文学家菲利普·崔博士正在寻求一个想法，专门为中等尺寸的望远镜开发一种低成本的AO系统。他将建造它，并将其安装在喷气推进实验室桌山天文台的1米望远镜上。该望远镜由波莫纳学院和哈维·穆德学院拥有和运营，AO仪器将为波莫纳学院、哈维·穆德学院和索诺马州立大学的学生培训和教职员工和学生研究提供高分辨率成像。

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.