This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Telescopes on the ground must observe objects in deep space through the interference of the earth's atmosphere. As light passes through the atmosphere it gets spread out by turbulence due to wind shear and changes in temperature and pressure within the atmospheric layers. These effects reduce the resolving power of earth-based telescopes. This difficulty can be overcome to a large extent by relatively new techniques employing Laser Guide Stars (LGS) and Adaptive Optics (AO) where a bright laser illuminates a patch of sky near the target object. Rayleigh scattering by small particles and molecules in the earth's atmosphere ensures that some of the light from the laser is returned to the telescope. The return signal can then be used to track the time-dependent distortion of the light. Adaptive Optics uses this information to rapidly adjust optics in the telescope to restore the image to (nearly) what would be seen from above the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, AO systems are very complex, expensive, and require considerable expertise to maintain and operate. Because of these factors, AO is currently limited to large telescopes. There are many interesting astronomical programs that would benefit from the higher resolution imaging capabilities enabled by AO, but only a handful of large telescopes currently have such systems. Dr. Christoph Baranec, a young postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, has an idea to develop a low-cost AO system specifically for modest sized telescopes. He will develop the system, make the design plans available publicly, and will also share the control software used by the system. This idea has the potential to make high-resolution imaging through AO available to a much wider community of observatories and astronomers.
