PARTIAL CORRECTION FOR TURBULENT DISTORTIONS IN TELESCOPES

To provide complete compensation for turbulent distortions in the visi ble range at aperture dimensions typical for modern telescopes (6-10 m ), one needs to develop adaptive systems with hundreds of control chan nels. More simple adaptive systems that provide complete compensation in the infrared range can give an essential advantage in angular resol ution in the visible range too. In this case the image brightness char acterized by the Strehl ratio remains much less than that in the diffr action-limited case, i.e., the system provides only partial compensati on. We present the results of numerical calculations of the partially corrected point-spread function and discuss possible approaches to com posing the adaptive system configuration. (C) 1998 Optical Society of America.