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First Star images Corrected by Multi-object Adaptive Optics
Gerard Rousset, RichardMyers, EricGendron, and TimMorris
The CANARY pathfinder at the William Herschel Telescope demon-strated on-sky an innovative technique that allows turbulence compen-sation of multiple very faint targets in a wide field of view.
To understand the evolution of the early Universe, it is necessary to observe a very large number of galaxies at high redshift and obtain information about their physics and evolution.Moreover, first-light objects must be detected and characterized. For such observations, the first key tool will be the optical European Ex-tremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). This instrument, currently un-der design, will have a primary mirror diameter on the order of 40m. Because it is ground-based, this telescope will suffer from image quality degradation caused by atmospheric turbulence. To overcome the problem, adaptive optics (AO) technology is re-quired for real-time compensation of spatial and temporal fluc-tuations in the wavefront. AO uses deformable mirrors (DMs) to cancel these aberrations. It has been under development for the last 20 years and is used on all 10m-class telescopes.
