Rayleigh laser guide stars for extremely large telescopes

Laird A. Thompson

doi:10.1117/12.459066

7 February 2003 Rayleigh laser guide stars for extremely large telescopes

Laird A. Thompson

Proceedings Volume 4839, Adaptive Optical System Technologies II; (2003) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.459066
Event: Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, 2002, Waikoloa, Hawai'i, United States

Abstract

Rayleigh laser guide star technology is discussed here with particular attention paid to the effects of laser pulse length, a parameter that becomes more significant to the design when telescope apertures are greater than 10 meters. After reviewing the relative return signal for Rayleigh versus sodium laser guide stars, a brief review of the pulse length characteristics of sodium lasers is given. Only one of the proposed sodium laser systems is pulsed while the others are CW. To insure star-like sources at the wavefront sensor with FWHM < 1.0 arcsec, lasers that will be most useful for Extremely Large Telescopes must have a short pulse format whereas CW lasers will be of little to no use. A relatively simple Rayleigh laser guide star method is described for Ground Layer Adaptive Optics (GLAO). This method provides a way to average out the effects of high altitude turbulence with a single Rayleigh laser guide star leaves intact the wavefront sign needed to correct ground-layer wavefront perturbations.

Citation Download Citation

Laird A. Thompson "Rayleigh laser guide stars for extremely large telescopes", Proc. SPIE 4839, Adaptive Optical System Technologies II, (7 February 2003); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.459066

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