Abstract

The Sun presents unusual problems for wave-front sensing. Unlike nighttime objects, the Sun does not provide natural, high-contrast point sources, and the creation of artificial beacons bright enough to be visible against the solar disk remains problematic with current technology. Conventional wave-front sensors, such as shearing interferometers and Shack-Hartmann systems, do not appear to operate effectively with targets such as solar granulation. Motivated by the experience with the Lockheed AO system built about a decade ago, we have performed a series of experiments at the Sacramento Peak Vacuum Tower Solar Telescope during the past two years to understand better the performance and limitations of various wave-front sensor concepts for solar imaging. We present here the first results of these "parallel" experiments for carrying out comparative tests of different wave-front sensors.

© 1992 Optical Society of America