A ground-based telescope can produce images that are nearly diffraction limited if the telescope is equipped with an adaptive optics system. Groups of astronomers around the world--in the U.S., in Europe and in China--are building and testing adaptive optics systems. However, if this technology is to be used productively by astronomers working at optical wavelengths, artificial guide stars must be created to provide the reference signal for the adaptive optics system because there are simply too few natural guide stars bright enough to provide the reference signal to drive the adaptive mirror. Under this award a method of producing artificial guide stars by Ragleigh scattering of a dye laser signal will be investigated.
