Separating atmospheric layers in adaptive optics.
Several optical schemes have been proposed to measure the separate contributions of atmospheric layers for astronomical adaptive optics. I show here that simple conjugation of the wave-front sensors to the layers is sufficient. Although a larger camera is required for a larger field of view, only the pixels that sense stars are being read out. The nearly periodic Hartmann data are analyzed by Fourier filtering so that the signals from all stars are added up while most of the noise is excluded. Acoustic Hartmann wave-front sensors [Opt. Lett. 26, 1834 (2001)1 that switch between layers improve flexibility and sensitivity.
Ribak
Erez N
EN
Department of Physics, Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel. eribak@physics.technion.ac.il