Stars are
so far away that they would appear as "points" of light in a telescope, if it
weren't for the effects of distortion in the earth's atmosphere. In the figure
on the left, the inset (in the upper left hand corner) shows an uncorrected and
an adaptive optics image of a star, taken on Lick Observatory's 3 meter telescope.
The white color represents the highest intensities, and orange-red the lowest
intensities. The uncorrected image shows the deleterious effects of atmospheric
blurring which are to a large extent removed by adaptive optics.
The larger surface plot (lower image) contains the same information
as the "picture", but now the height of the "peaks" represents
the intensity of the light at each point on the detector.
The surface plot is useful because it shows that adaptive
optics not only makes images smaller, it also greatly increases their peak intensity
because all the light is now falling on a very small area of the detector.
Engineering the Eye June 13-15, 2002 Symposium.
at the Center for Vision Science University of Rochester.
Topics include the study of eye movements to perceptual constancy, information
coding and applications of Adaptive Optics to advanced instrumentation for eye
disease diagnostics and vision correction.
For more info.
Call for Papers
The International Society for Optical Engineering - Astronomical Telescopes and
Instrumentation is holding a conference on the
22-28 August 2002, at the Hilton Waikoloa Village Hotel, Hawaii
General Chair: J. Roger P. Angel, Steward Observatory/Univ. of Arizona
Deputy General Chair: James B. Breckinridge, National Science Foundation
Sessions will feature:
Astronomy with Large Telescopes
UVOIR Ground Instruments
Astronomy Information Technologies
Space Telescopes and Instruments
Millimeter and Submillimeter Detectors
Astronomy Outside the EM Spectrum
Astrobiology
http://spie.org/Conferences/calls/02/as/
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