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CAMERA is an autonomous laser guide star adaptive optics system designed for small aperture telescopes. This system is intended to be mounted permanently on such a telescope to provide large amounts of flexibly scheduled observing time, delivering high angular resolution imagery in the visible and near infrared. The design employs a Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor, a 12x12 actuator MEMS device for high order wavefront compensation, and a solid state 355nm ND:YAG laser to generate a guide star. Commercial CCD and InGaAs detectors provide coverage in the visible and near infrared. CAMERA operates by selecting targets from a queue populated by users and executing these observations autonomously. This robotic system is targeted towards applications that are diffcult to address using classical observing strategies: surveys of very large target lists, recurrently scheduled observations, and rapid response followup of transient objects. This system has been designed and costed, and a lab testbed has been developed to evaluate key components and validate autonomous operations.

A point source deconvolution technique is described that models the effects of anisoplanatism on the adaptive optics point spread function. This technique is used in the analysis of a quadruple system observed using the Palomar Adaptive Optics system on the Hale 5 meter telescope. Two members of this system reside in a .1 asec double. Deconvolution of this close double was performed using the PSF of a third member of the system, which was offset from the double by 12 asec. Incorporation of anisoplanatism into the deconvolution procedure requires knowledge of the turbulence profile, which was measured at the time of these observations using a DIMM/MASS unit at Palomar Observatory.

PALM-3000 is proposed to be the first visible-light sodium laser guide star astronomical adaptive optics system. Deployed as a multi-user shared facility on the 5.1 meter Hale Telescope at Palomar Mountain, this state-of-the-art upgrade to the successful Palomar Adaptive Optics System will have the unique capability to open the visible light spectrum to diffraction-limited scientific access from the ground, providing angular imaging resolution as fine as 16 milliarcsec with modest sky coverage fraction.

In this paper, we provide an overview of the adaptive optics (AO) program for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project, including an update on requirements; the philosophical approach to developing an overall AO system architecture; the recently completed conceptual designs for facility and instrument AO systems; anticipated first light capabilities and upgrade options; and the hardware, software, and controls interfaces with the remainder of the observatory. Supporting work in AO component development, lab and field tests, and simulation and analysis is also discussed. Further detail on all of these subjects may be found in additional papers in this conference., Astronomical telescopes and instrumentation 2006: technology advancements, 24-31 May, 2006, Orlando, Florida, USA, Series: Proceedings of SPIE; no. 6272

Optics and Photonics 2005, July 31 - August 4, 2005, San Diego, California, United States, Series: Proceedings of SPIE; no. 5903