Lick Observatory Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics System Commissioning

A sodium-layer laser guide star adaptive optics system has been developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for use on the 3 meter Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory located on Mount Hamilton, near San Jose, California. The system is based on a 127-actuator continuous-surface deformable mirror, a Hartmann wavefront sensor equipped with a fast-framing low-noise CCD camera, and a pulsed solid-state-pumped dye laser tuned to the atomic sodium resonance line at 589 nm. Figure 1 shows a picture of the laser beam being projected from the dome of the Shane Telescope.