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Viewing report
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Wave-front sensing for adaptive optics in astronomy. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, June 2008, Pages: 244
Since the invention of the telescope, astronomers have been able
to view fainter and smaller objects in the sky. The main
limitation to the quality of the images obtained has been, until
recently, the presence of turbulence in the atmosphere. To
mitigate the effects of the turbulence, adaptive optics systems
have been successfully implemented. Adaptive optics relies upon
measuring the distortion of the wave-front caused by the
atmospheric turbulence, called wave-front sensing, and
compensating for it in an adaptive fashion. The aim of this thesis
is to provide a summary of the state-of-the-art of wave-front
sensing and to describe my contributions to the field.
The most significant result in the thesis is the derivation of a new wave-front sensing technique.
This approach uses the geometric optics approximation, which considers light to travel
perpendicular to the wave-front. Consequently, a wave-front slope in a region of the telescope
aperture causes the displacement of a ray of light passing through that region. By taking two
defocused images, it is possible to deduce how the light intensity changed from one image to the
other.
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