Adaptive optics is a technology to improve the performance of optical systems by reducing the effects of rapidly changing optical distortion.
adaptive optics
An optical system that enables rapid fluctuations in a telescope's image quality, caused by atmospheric turbulence, to be corrected in fractions of a second.
Adaptive Optics
What is Adaptive Optics?
Further Information
Questions ...
Adaptive Optics
References
Babcock, H. W. "Adaptive Optics Revisited." Science 249, 253-257, 1990.
An adaptive optics system is made up of three basic components: a wave front corrector (deformable mirror), a wave front sensor, and a control system (real-time computer).
Adaptive Optics
Recent advances in deformable mirror technology and laser guide stars allows most of the distortion produced by the atmosphere to be removed.
adaptive optics
Recent technology utilized by the most advanced telescopes in the world. Computers measure the atmospheric turbulence and thousands of actuators slightly deform the mirror to compensate for it.
adaptive optics Technique used to increase the resolution of a telescope by deforming the shape of the mirror's surface under computer control while a measurement is being taken, to undo the effects of atmospheric turbulence.
Adaptive Optics - A system for modifying the shape of the mirror of a telescope to compensate for atmospheric seeing and to produce sharp images
Ae and Be Stars - Pre-main sequence stars more massive than 3 solar masses ...
Adaptive Optics
Computer controlled telescope mirrors that can adjust for some changes in seeing conditions
Alt-Azimuth Mounting ...
adaptive optics: Computer-controlled telescope mirrors that can at least partially compensate for seeing.
albedo: The fraction of the light that hits an object that is reflected.
adaptive optics
a system of telescopes, computers, and deformable mirrors used to compensate for atmospheric blurring
albedo ...
Adaptive Optics
Compensating for atmospheric distortions in a wavefront by high-speed changes in the shape of a small, thin mirror.
ADC ...
Adaptive optics- the technology that allows, based on a laser beam aimed through the atmosphere, a computer to make very slight modifications to a telescope's mirror, which will correct for atmospheric distortions ...
ADAPTIVE OPTICS
Adaptive optics (AO) is a process in which distortions (like those from the Earth's atmosphere) are removed from a telescope's image in real time.
"Adaptive optics systems on Keck and other large ground-based telescopes make sharper images than even the Hubble Space Telescope," says co-author Trent Dupuy.
An adaptive optics system was used in 2001 to obtain images comparable to the quality of those of the Hubble Space Telescope.
World's most advanced camera captures binary star eclipse ...
[4.4] ADAPTIVE OPTICS & MODERN OPTICAL INTERFEROMETRY
[4.5] VERY LARGE TELESCOPE (VLA) / LARGE BINOCULAR TELESCOPE (LBT)
[4.6] OTHER NEW TELESCOPES ...
adaptive optics a technique that compensates for atmospheric turbulence by quickly adjusting the light path in the optics.
adaptive optics (NASA Thesaurus) Real-time optical correction for atmospheric perturbations and other system error sources. ADC (abbr) (NASA SP-7, 1965) = analog to digital converter.
Advances in adaptive optics have extended the high-resolution imaging capabilities of ground-based telescopes to the infrared imaging of faint objects.
large telescopes equipped with adaptive optics or orbiting observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope) or passing spacecraft.
Selecting observatory sites with "good seeing" (and distant from urban lights!) became a big consideration, and ultimately "adaptive optics" overcame the problem of turbulence, ...
Space observations (or those with adaptive optics) help most for angularly small objects (HST resolves numerous compact galaxies that look stellar from the ground).
Note that some of the most advanced modern telescopes have a system called adaptive optics. Computer control of a flexible mirror allows some of the atmospheric distortion to be removed, improving the image quality.
Image from the Very Large Telescope taken using Adaptive Optics. There are more stars visible in this view and each star is clearly seen - not blurry - since the telescope is not only larger than the Hubble, but used adaptive optics.
Found using the University of Hawaii's Adaptive Optics system Hokupa`a and its QUIRC infrared imager at the Gemini Observatory, the object is a brown dwarf of spectral type L7, with about 38 to 70 times the mass of Jupiter.
Many ground based infrared telescopes are now using adaptive optics to create very sharp images. Adaptive optics removes the blurring of an astronomical image due to turbulence in earth's atmosphere.
The resolution achieved with adaptive optics that adjust the shape of its mirror a thousand times a second in order to compensate for the ever changing atmosphere.
Eugenia's moon was discovered in 1999 by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, using an adaptive optics system to compensate for the blurring of Earth's atmosphere. More information and graphics can be found at: ...
The angular region on the sky over which the wavefront correction applied by an adaptive optics system remains valid. It is relatively small and therefore a nearby reference star is also required. [McL97]
Isospin ...
Voyager Uranus Science Summary from JPL
The Uranian Ring System
Ground based images using adaptive optics, very impressive!
even more impressive images from Keck
Uranian System Nomenclature Tables ...
Observations of Pluto in occultation with Charon were able to fix Pluto's diameter at roughly 2,390 km. With the invention of adaptive optics astronomers were able to accurately determine its shape.
Observations were also gleaned from near-infrared adaptive optics observations with the Keck II telescope on May 28, 2007, and reported in an article appearing on August 23 in Science Express, the online edition of Science Magazine.
In recent years, some technologies to overcome the bad effect of atmosphere on ground-based telescopes were developed, with good results. See tip-tilt mirror and adaptive optics.
These adaptive optics mechanisms cannot respond quickly enough to eliminate roughness, which is however "filtered" out by the smaller aperture of the separately tilting mirrors; ...
When first launched by the Space Shuttle 'Discovery' in 1990, it provided unprecedented spatial resolution due to its position above the Earth's atmosphere, observing through which results in diffraction-limited seeing for non-adaptive optics ...
of the course of 2,000 years of the history of astronomy, we were never able to observe the surface of any of these stars, except one. Only in the last few yards have space borne telescopes and ground based telescopes equiped with adaptive optics ...
University of Toronto astronomers used adaptive optics, a technology that compensates for the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere, to obtain the image with the Gemini North Telescope. [Gemini Observatory] ...
The twin Keck telescopes, in domes a few hundred feet apart, have adaptive optics that make them equivalent in resolving power to a telescope with a mirror 280 ft (85 m) across. The CHARA Array, fully operational in 2002, consists of six 39-in.
 See also: Telescope, Light, Earth, Astronomy, Orbit
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