A disadvantage of ground-based optical astronomy is that the earth’s atmosphere is between the telescope and objects of interest. It turns out that the largest limiting factor in conducting observations is due to turbulence in the atmospheric air.

For astronomic observations Adaptive Optics is used to address this: measurements of the atmospheric turbulence in combination with deformable optics are used to obtain a clear image.

In this talk, focus shall be on so-called Laser Launch Telescope, a critical part of any astronomical AO system. LLTs create artificial stars that serve as reference objects for the AO system. TNO realized four of these systems for ESO’s Very Large Telescope and is currently working on similar systems for the Extremely Large Telescope.

The speaker will be: Martijn van Riel

We will start at 12:02pm on July 4 2022

Please send an email to info@dspe.nl if you are interested in this Lunch lecture.