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Session 42 - Ground-Based Optical Telescopes & Instruments.
Display session, Tuesday, January 14
Metropolitan Ballroom,
Significant image improvement has recently been demonstrated with a laser guide star adaptive optics system on the 3 m Shane telescope at Lick Observatory located on Mount Hamilton, near San Jose, California. These results represent the first ever achieved using high-order adaptive optics and a sodium-layer laser guide star. Corrected images recorded at a wavelength of 2.2 microns showed a factor of 3 increase in peak intensity and a factor of 2.4 decrease in full width at half maximum to less than 1/3 arc second.
The Lick Observatory laser guide star adaptive optics system was developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The system is based on a 127-actuator continuous-surface deformable mirror, a Hartmann wavefront sensor equipped with a fast-framing low-noise CCD camera, and a pulsed solid-state-pumped dye laser tuned to the atomic sodium resonance line at 589 nm.
