An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics
English-French-Persian

A technique for improving the → image quality of a telescope against → atmospheric turbulence in which image distortions are compensated by high-speed changes in the shape of a small, thin mirror. → wavefront; → wavefront distortion; → wavefront correction; → Strehl ratio; → tip-tilt mirror, → Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, → active optics.

→ adaptive; → optics.

An → adaptive optics instrument used on the → European Southern Observatory (ESO) 3.6-m telescope at La Silla. It was an upgraded version of COME-ON-PLUS, the → Very Large Telescope (VLT) adaptive optics prototype. It had 52 → actuators and performed corrections of the mirror 200 times per second. The reference → wavefront was sensed in the → visible. The observation was done in the → near-infrared (1-5 μm).

→ adaptive; → optics; → near-infrared; → system.

An → optical system that uses → adaptive optics.

→ adaptive; → optics; → system.

An → adaptive optics system with high-contrast imaging and spectroscopic capabilities. Extreme adaptive optics systems enable the detection of faint objects (e.g., → exoplanets) close to bright sources that would otherwise overwhelm them. This is accomplished both by increasing the peak intensity of point-source images and by removing light scattered by the atmosphere and the telescope optics into the → seeing disk.

→ extreme; → adaptive; → optics.