Abstract

Adaptive optics has been used to obtain spectacular images of binary stars with nearly diffraction limited resolution [1]. To date, however, we have not seen similar pictures of, for example, the planet Jupiter, because of the small size of the corrected field. Theoretical analysis of adaptive optical telescopes has shown that the low levels of residual phase error required to achieve such high resolution is only obtained over a field which is a few arcseconds in diameter [2]. The reason for this limitation is that as the reference source used for wavefront sensor (WFS) measurements is increasingly separated from the object points to be compensated, the reference and object wavefronts are increasingly decorrelated. When the angular separation between object and wavefront is greater than approximately the isoplanatic angle, the WFS measurements are no longer useful for image compensation.

© 1992 Optical Society of America