Adaptive Optics for Advanced Astrophysical Instrumentation

配备自适应光学（AO）的望远镜通过监测大气层不断变化的湍流，然后“调整”光学系统进行补偿，从而消除由于大气湍流造成的光学模糊。通过快速控制可变形镜实现的这些适应性调整，大大提高了最终图像的分辨率，并允许大型地面望远镜达到其分辨率极限，这比哈勃太空望远镜的分辨率高出许多倍。早期的AO系统在有限的视场（FOV）上提供校正，一侧只有几十角秒。虽然它适用于一些天文学研究，但它减少了对更大物体（如星系）的研究。宽视场AO系统在大得多的FOV上产生校正。目前的想法倾向于多共轭AO（MCAO），用于在将信号分配给仪器之前适度校正整个FOV，以及多目标AO（MOAO），用于在仪器内应用，以提供围绕多个科学目标的精确校正。

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.