Adaptive optics
Óptica adaptativa
- Date
- 1953-1990 · confidence medium
- Place
- Pasadena, California, United States
- Credited to
- Horace Babcock (proposal); military and ESO teams (first systems)
- Field
- Communication
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
A deformable mirror that corrects atmospheric distortion in real time, as measured with a wavefront sensor. It brings ground-based telescopes close to their diffraction limit.
Babcock proposed the idea in 1953 from Mount Wilson; the first working systems were military (1970s) and ESO's COME-ON (1989) in astronomy. Date and place are conventional.
What it led to
- sharp images from ground telescopes (Keck, VLT)
- imaging of the living retina
- direct detection of exoplanets