Christoph Baranec, faculty at the University of Hawaii, visited our department this week to speak about his work with robotic adaptive optics (Robo-AO), an automated adaptive optics system. Robo-AO can operate without human supervision and perform the wavefront corrections necessary to mitigate fluctuations in the atmosphere and sharpen the image. The reliability and streamlined software architecture of Robo-AO makes it extremely efficient for surveying many targets per night. Lessons learned from the Robo-AO project could be used to automate other Laser AO systems, or improve performance of extreme-AO instruments.

A photo by the Robo-AO team of their UV laser used to measure the atmospheric fluctuation. The laser is not actually visible to the naked eye but was taken with a digital camera that had its UV filter removed, as Christoph explained during the beginning of his talk. Photo credit: Robo-AO team.