Aidan Karley wrote:
In article , Gleb wrote:

On the other hand we have little experience with astronomy and therefore any
advice would help.

Odd. I can't think of any other field than astronomy with a real need
for AO. Might just be my lack of imagination though.

Long range surveillance cameras and spotting scopes are two that come to
mind. The scintillation distortion looking horizontally though 1000
meters of air in the daytime is often worse than looking at stars though
100km of atmosphere vertically at night. Bigger optics don't help much
for daytime observation as the telescopes are neither limited by photon
rate or the telescope's optical characteristics.

While there wouldn't be bright stars in the field for reference, a low
power near IR laser "collimated" though the same deformable mirror could
illuminate a point in the image plane being viewed. Something under
5mw should do for a distance of 500 to perhaps 2000 meters horizontally
aginst an object of modest albedo like a rock, tree, or building.
It could also provide autofocusing as a side benefit. The AO sensor
could be filtered to only see the laser wavelength, leaving the rest of
the band for the surveillance camera (perhaps also near IR) or a visual
observer. Scintillation is somewhat wavelength dependent, but I'd still
expect a considerable improvment in image quality.

3. The system will require an additional laptop computer to run the AO and
will add to the complexity of the telescope setup.

Will it? The AO would need to be operating while your imager is
accumulating photons, but that accumulation does not really need the active
participation of the computer. While you're reading the imager though, you
don't really need the AO to be operating. Do you?

To be of real use the update rate of the deformable mirror has to be as
fast as the major components of scintillation are changing. In windy
conditions video frame rates of 30 or 60 times per second are none too
fast. It takes a healthy computer to analyze each frame, compute the
motions for all of the actuators and set them in well under 1/60 second.

For a computer which has nothing else to do than read a CCD only one
computer would be needed. If it also has to keep a telescopes altitude
and azimuth servos correct, run an autoguider, and still allow the
telescope operator to play video games it might take two.