University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have taken advantage of a recently mounted laser guide star system at UC’s Lick Observatory to obtain sharp, twinkle-free images of the faint dusty ...

Ground-based telescopes have long contended with atmospheric turbulence that diminishes image clarity, and the advent of adaptive optics combined with laser guide stars has been transformative in ...

Sodium laser guide star (LGS) adaptive optics (AO) systems have become highly productive tools for all-sky astronomical observations with large telescopes. However, the performance of these systems is ...

Ten years in the making, the five-point laser 'constellation' forms the key element in an adaptive optics system that will generate ultra-sharp astronomical images. A laser system built by Lockheed ...

Foreword / Robert Q Fugate -- Preface -- Introduction -- List of acronyms -- 1: Sputnik, reality, and technology -- 2: Early days: the Romans -- 3: Rome and Itek: first adaptive optics systems -- 4: ...

A novel approach to laser guide star technology will be demonstrated at the forthcoming SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference in Amsterdam (1-4 July 2012). Laser guide stars are ...

ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has achieved first light with a new adaptive optics mode called laser tomography -- and has captured remarkably sharp test images of the planet Neptune and other ...

For astronomers, it’s a magical moment: you’re staring at a monitor, and a blurry image of a cosmological object sharpens up, revealing new details. We call this “closing the loop,” a reference to the ...

General Atomics has acquired Longmont, Colorado-based adaptive optics technology developer Guidestar Optical Systems as part of efforts to introduce “groundbreaking” platforms in both the defense and ...

Adaptive optics (AO) measures and then corrects the atmospheric turbulence using a deformable mirror that changes shape 1,000 times per second. Initially, AO relied on the light of a star that was ...

Maunakea, Hawaii - One of the most scientifically productive adaptive optics (AO) systems on Earth is getting a major upgrade, one that will further advance high-impact research on the hunt for ...