<title>Natural guide star AO system for the William Herschel Telescope</title>

Abstract

The UK Adaptive Optics program is funded to provide common user adaptive optics facilities for UK telescopes. One phase of this program aims to provide an adaptive optical system for the 4.2 m William Herschel Telescope (WHT), sited on La Palma in the Canary Islands. The WHT natural guide star (NGS) adaptive optics system is specified to have optimum correction at 2.2 micrometer in typical to good site seeing conditions. The initial detector system is an infrared camera with a 256 multiplied by 256 InSb array detector. The system will be mounted at the Nasmyth focus on the GHRIL (General High Resolution Imaging Laboratory) optical bench. The AO system optical design currently uses a conventional pupil imaged deformable mirror and an 8 multiplied by 8 Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor (WFS). A CCD camera is intended as the wavefront sensor detector, based on a 64 multiplied by 64 or 80 multiplied by 80 pixel detector array. Modes for turbulent layer conjugation are currently being investigated. It is intended that the system should be a common-user facility. Therefore functions of system configuration, alignment, and operation are being designed to be operated by non-specialists, so that the facility can be used in the same way as one of the standard suite of instruments available for the telescope. This paper describes the current conceptual design of the system.© (1995) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.