Pupil Image!

I got to spend Friday working on the AO system. It was a good time... I took this 16" telescope that points at a 1m mirror out in the parking lot and mounted a big lens behind it. This "relay" lens takes the "pupil" of the telescope (typically the entrance of the tube) and reimages it on the deformable mirror. Fun stuff. Now we can use the system on real stars to test it out without spending a few thousand $$ per hour for telescope time!

I took a screen and moved it along the path to get images of the "pupil", window, car out in the parking lot, and finally the plastic cover for that 1m mirror. Cool stuff.