The AO Bench!

Here's the AO bench - light comes in from the top right. There's a laser and a slide projector that make up the sky and "guide-star". The first knobby post is the aberrator. The two smaller lenses before the blue thing is "the telescope". The blue thing in the upper left is the deformable mirror. The light bounces off that toward the middle of the image. The next two lenses focus the light through the beamsplitter (glass) on to the "science camera" in the middle. The beamsplitter also sends 50% of the light down toward the lower left. That part is the wavefront sensor. The first lens collimates the light onto a lenslet array (knobby thing). The lenslets make a bunch of spots on the camera in the lower left.

The software that runs the setup does a few steps. You find the spots and then the software pulls on the deformable mirror to measure how the spots remove as the mirror responds....


Then there is display software to show how the shape of the deformable mirror as the system is correcting the optics.