Adaptive Optics World Tour

Adaptive Optics World Tour 1996

There a lot going on in AO all around the world. All the major telescopes being build have their own AO project, and a considerable number of existing telescopes are being retrofitted with some kind of AO system. Below is a non-exhaustive list (doing our best to follow the last developments) of what's going on. It is largely based on the previously existing lists compiled by the UNISIS group

and the UHAO group

. For those systems for which we haven't been able to find URLs, we have mentionned a bibliographic reference. If you know about other systems not mentionned here, please let us know.

AO system survey

You can also download a compressed postcript of a paper entitled " Review of astronomical adaptive optics systems on medium-sized (1.55 m) telescopes" (25kB).

I (FR) have had the chance to do a review of existing and projected AO systems at the Maui AO conference in June 1996. This will allow you to browse the data base I got out the survey I completed to write this paper.

Links to other AO sites

Instruments that have seen star light :

Adonis / Comeon

(ESO/France)

University of Hawaii AO

CFHT AOB of course !

ACE

(Mt Wilson

)

AO at the 100''

(Mt Wilson

)

Starfire Optical Range

(Phillips Laboratory

)

ChAOS

(U.Chicago

/ Apache Point

)

MARTINI

(UK)

LLNL AO system at Lick Observatory

National Solar Observatory

AO system (Sacramento Peak)

Neural Network AO system at the MMT (Llyod-Hart M. et al., ApJ., 390, L41-L44, 1992)

FASTTRAC2

(Center for Adaptive Optics

at the Steward Observatory, ThermoTrex, Instituto d'Astrofisico di Firenze) at the Steward 90" telescope

and Steward 61" telescope

China AO system (Jiang W. et al., pp127--135, in "Active and adaptive optics", Proc. of the ICO-16 satellite conf., Aug 2-5, 1993, Garching, Germany)

WCE

(Yerkes

/KAC) (Wild W. et al.,SPIE 2201, 1121-1134, 1994)

Max Plank Institute AO system (Calar Alto)

AO-5 on the Meyer Binocular Telescope