Adaptive Optics World Tour

CFHT, Instruments, Imaging, AOB, 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).F. Rigaut did a review of existing and projected AO systems at the Maui AO conference in June 1996. This link will allow you to browse the data base he completed to write this paper.

Links to other AO sites

Instruments that have seen star light :

Adonis (ESO/France)

University of Hawaii AO

CFHT AOB of course !

ACE (Mt Wilson)

Keck AO project

Gemini AO project

AO at the 100'' (Mt Wilson)

Starfire Optical Range (Phillips Laboratory)

AEOS on Haleakala

ChAOS (U.Chicago / Apache Point)

MARTINI III (UK)

AO for the 200 inch at Palomar (JPL)

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