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The visible and near infrared observations using ground-based telescopes (1m-class or higher) are affected by the continuously varying spatial and temporal in-homogeneities of the Earth’s atmosphere. Horace W. Babcock in 1953 proposed the concept of ‘adaptive optics’, compensating for these aberrations using a mirror that can deform its shape. The field of Adaptive Optics (AO) gained real momentum towards the end of 1980s, and is one of the fastest developing technical fields in astronomy. In this talk, I shall take you through the basic principles of AO, touch on the zoo of current AO systems, and then focus on one of the most advanced and unique AO systems tested to date – the LINC-NIRVANA AO system. LINC- NIRVANA (LN) is a German-Italian near-infrared high-resolution imager for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). When LN works at its full strength, it will combine the light from both the two 8.4 m primary mirrors of the LBT via Fizeau-interferometry, obtaining the spatial resolution of a 23 m-class telescope and the collecting area of a 12m-class telescope.
To illustrate the capabilities and benefits of an AO system, I will show the final results from our recent work on T-Tauri stars using an Extreme-AO system, where we discovered new outflows using the SPHERE instrument at the Very Large Telescope.
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