CHOUGH:The CANARY-Hosted Upgrade for High-Order Adaptive Optics;

天文自适应光学用于消除地球大气对光学望远镜观测天空的一些影响。星星的闪烁就是一个例子。没有AO，地面图像的清晰度和亮度与空间望远镜所能达到的效果相比会严重下降。下一代超大望远镜的直径将超过30米，而今天的直径为8米。他们将无法进入太空，所以他们基本上需要自适应光学技术来完成他们的科学任务。到目前为止，通过与法国的关键合作，英国已经集中在自适应光学技术上，这些技术需要校正这些大型望远镜在大范围天空中的图像。例如，这很重要，因为它将使许多最早和最遥远的星系能够同时被调查，因此它们的形成可以与模型进行比较，而不是单独进行比较。由于一晚的观测成本超过5万英镑，AO最终将节省资金和时间，并提高测量数据的质量。为了最大限度地提高ao增强图像的质量，我们可以专注于对一个目标进行非常高程度的校正，而不是对许多目标进行适度的质量校正。这被称为高阶自适应光学，它使我们能够研究小而明亮的物体，如恒星及其形状和当前状态。更令人兴奋的是，它还将让我们看到这些恒星附近的空间区域，在那里我们可以看到它们是否有暗淡的伴星，比如失败的恒星或褐矮星。更令人兴奋的是，这些星周区域可以容纳行星形成的尘埃和气体盘，所以我们需要AO来更好地理解天体物理学的这一方面。HOAO非常困难，因为我们必须比目前更精细、更快地应用AO校正，这就是为什么我们只关注一个目标。该项目将使英国能够更充分地参与HOAO的这一领域。它将允许我们重新使用一个现有的实验，CANARY，通过扩展一个非常高分辨率的可变形镜来纠正星光，以及新的测量相机来驱动这个镜子。我们已经拥有了这面镜子，所以这个项目是一个低成本但高结果的实验，它将使用位于加那利群岛拉帕尔马的威廉赫歇尔望远镜来证明这种新型的AO。我们的项目被称为CHOUGH，即高阶自适应光学的金丝雀高阶升级，它的名字来自拉帕尔马岛上常见的一种乌鸦。WHT望远镜特别重要，因为它有一个专门建造的实验室来支持对CHOUGH等新想法的测试，这意味着有可能证明CHOUGH中的想法在现实生活中起作用，我们称之为“天空”，而不仅仅是在计算机模拟中。

Astronomical Adaptive Optics is used to remove some of the effects of the Earth's atmosphere from observations of the sky made with optical telescopes. An example is the twinkling of the stars. Without AO, the sharpness and brightness of ground-based images is severely degraded with respect to what could be achieved by a telescope in space. The next generation of extremely large telescopes will have diameters of over 30m, compared with 8m today. They will not be able to go into space, so they basically require adaptive optics technology in order to fulfil their scientific missions.Up to now the UK has concentrated, via a key collaboration with France, on the adaptive optics technologies required to correct the images from these large telescopes over a wide range of the sky. This is important, for example, because it will enable many of the earliest and most distant galaxies to be surveyed simultaneously, so their formation can be compared with models, instead of individually. With one night of observing costing over £50000, AO will also ultimately save money as well as time and improve the quality of the data measured.Instead of moderate quality correction for many targets, we can instead concentrate on a very high degree of correction for one target in order to maximize the quality of the AO-enhanced images. This is called High-Order Adaptive Optics and enables us to study small, bright objects such as stars and their shape and current state. More excitingly, it will also let us look at the regions of space close to these stars where we can see if they have faint companions such as failed stars or brown dwarfs. Even more excitingly, these circumstellar regions can hold discs of dust and gas from which planets form so we need AO to better understand this aspect of astrophysics. HOAO is very difficult because we must apply AO correction both more finely and more quickly than is currently done which is why we focus on only one target.This project will enable to the UK to participate much more fully in this area of HOAO. It will do so by allowing us to re-use an existing experiment, CANARY, by extending it with a very high resolution deformable mirror, which corrects the starlight, and new measurement cameras to drive this mirror. The mirror is already in our possession, so this project is a low-cost but high-results experiment that will prove this novel type of AO using the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma, Canary Islands. Our project is called CHOUGH, or the Canary High Order UpGrade for High-order adaptive optics and its name comes from a type of crow commonly found on La Palma. The WHT telescope is particularly important as it has a purpose built laboratory to support the testing of new ideas such as CHOUGH, and this means it is possible to show that the ideas in CHOUGH work in real-life, which we call "on sky", instead of just in computer simulations.