Improved performance of adaptive optics in the visible

This paper shows that a high-order wave-front sensor can dramatically improve the performance of a rigid-mirror adaptive optics system. This can be achieved by a simple tip-tilt mirror which can increase the peak intensity of the corrected image almost ten times using the basis that remaining effective aberration i.e., the aberration modulo 2π is used for obtaining the best fit to the turbulent wave front, especially for observations in the visible range. For linear fitting to the wave front, the brightest speckle in image space corresponds to the minimum of the effective error sum in Fourier space. Application to improving the performance of telescopes by retrofitting with tip-tilt or tip-tilt and defocus adaptive mirrors is described.