Control Results and Improvements for the ALFA
Adaptive Optics System
Professor Doug Looze
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Massachesettes
Adaptive optics systems are employed to reduce the effect of atmospheric
turbulence in optical systems. This talk will review the principles of
adaptive optics and describe the design of the ALFA (Adaptive Optics
with
Lasers for Astronomy) system that is implemented on the Calar Alto 3.5m
telescope. Recent results using the ALFA system will be presented. The
talk
will identify several current limitations of the ALFA system and discuss
approaches that are being pursued to rectify these limitations.