RSAA Colloquia / Seminars / Feast-of-Facts: Thursday, 12 June 2025, 11:00-12:00; ZOOM or Duffield Lecture Theatre


Francois Rigaut

"Wide Field Adaptive Optics"

Wide field Adaptive Optics (AO) is the branch of AO that aims to deliver compensation of atmospheric turbulence for ground-based optical telescope over patches of sky larger than the isoplanatic patch imposed by the nature of turbulence - typically 10 to 20" - delivered by the so-called Single-Conjugate AO. In this talk - a rehash of a keynote talk delivered at the Wide-Field AO workshop in Tokyo earlier this year - I will review Wide-Field AO (WFAO) systems, and explain their principles and how they beat fundamental limitations on both wavefront sensing and phase compensation. I will also review the various type of WFAO breeds, including GLAO, MCAO and MOAO, with some illustrating example systems.