AO Closes the Loop!
05 Feb 99
Fred Chaffee attempts to put the event in perspective: "This was
an historic night at the Keck Observatory. The promise of producing
diffraction-limited near-infrared images on the world's largest telescope
reached a major milestone tonight, with the first closing of the AO loop.
The AO team and the many others on the Observatory
staff who made this evening possible deserve the heartiest congratulations.
Scott Acton may have put it best at night's end: 'It's a miracle!'"
"First light" Keck II adaptive optics images before and after closing-the-AO-loop
on a V=5.6 A0 star at 0300 HST on 2/5/99. The image at H (1.6 um)
improved from 600 to 44 milliarcseconds and the strehl by a factor of about
100 to ~25%. The exposure time using K-CAM (which has 17 mas pixels) was
5 seconds with ND3.
There are now many results from the scientific verification
program; these have been ordered by astrophysical categories:
-
SOLAR SYSTEM (Vesta,
Io,
Titan,
Neptune,
Uranus,
Pluto-Charon)
-
STARS (binary, visible
AO, near-IR AO, HD98800,
GL569B)
-
THE GALACTIC CENTER
-
GALAXIES (NGC 7469, faint
galaxy)
Also check out the Control
room photos during the first commissioning night.
Acknowledgements:
The Keck II AO Facility was made possible by a grant
from the W.M. Keck Foundation and funds from NASA. The Natural Guide Star
AO system was fabricated by Keck Observatory and Lawrence Livermore National
Lab (LLNL provided the wavefront controller).
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