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A laser system to generate sodium-layer guide stars has been designed, built and delivered to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The system uses frequency doubled YAG lasers to pump liquid dye lasers and produces 20 W of average power. The design and performance results of this laser system are presented.

The installation and performance characteristics of a 20 W sodium beacon laser system for the 3 m Shane telescope at the Lick Observatory are presented.

The design and background data for a sodium layer laser guide star system to be installed on the 3 meter telescope at Lick Observatory is presented. A 30 W dye laser at 589 nm and 10 kHz will be mounted on the telescope and will be pumped by fiber coupled, frequency doubled YAG laser located in a separate room.© (1994) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

We present the design and implementation of a very compact adaptive optics system that senses the return light from a sodium guide-star and controls a deformable mirror and a pointing mirror to compensate atmospheric perturbations in the wavefront. The deformable mirror has 19 electrostrictive actuators and triangular subapertures. The wavefront sensor is a Hartmann sensor with lenslets on triangular centers. The high-bandwidth steering mirror assembly incorporates an analog controller that samples the tilt with an avalanche photodiode quad cell. An f/25 imaging leg focuses the light into a science camera that can either obtain long-exposure images or speckle data. In laboratory tests overall Strehl ratios were improved by a factor of 3 when a mylar sheet was used as an aberrator. The crossover frequency at unity gain is 30 Hz.