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Session 76 - Adaptive Optics.
Display session, Wednesday, January 17
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
The Chicago Adaptive Optics System (ChAOS) was begun in 1989 to develop an affordable high-order laser guide star adaptive optics system for large telescopes. Department of Defense systems have been too large, complex, and expensive to make them very useful to most astronomers. By concentrating on designing and constructing many of our components in-house, we were able to greatly reduce the size, complexity, and cost of an adaptive optics system. Some of the components that we have created include several deformable mirrors, the wavefront reconstruction electronics, and the operating and control software of the system. This paper outlines the construction of these components and summarizes the complete operational version of ChAOS.
