Active Control and Adaptive Optics for Optical Interferometers

Extract

Long baseline interferometry requires the full phasing of a telescope array. Especially for future arrays with large unit telescopes active control systems are mandatory. Adaptive optics can be applied for real-time phase compensation of the individual pupils due to atmospheric distortions. Additional to phasing of the individual pupils of independently mounted telescopes, the whole array has to be phased, including pupil position corrections due to pupil foreshortening and shift effects in order to reach a reasonable phased field-of-view.