Telescope wavefront aberration compensation with a deformable mirror in an adaptive optics system

Abstract

With the goal of reducing the surface wavefront error of low-cost multi-meter-diameter mirrors from about 10 waves peak-to-valley (P-V), at 1μm wavelength, to approximately 1-wave or less, we describe a method to compensate for slowly varying wavefront aberrations of telescope mirrors. A deformable mirror is utilized in an active optical compensation system. The RMS wavefront error of a 0.3m telescope improved to 0.05 waves (0.26 waves P-V) from the original value of 1.4 waves RMS (6.5 waves P-V), measured at 633nm, and the Strehl ratio improved to 89% from the original value of 0.08%.