2006/11/09 by Alastair Basden, Basden, Alastair, Timothy Butterley +7
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Optical Systems and Laser Technology #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0611294
Accepted by Applied Optics
arxiv created 2006/11/09 · openalex publication_date 2006/11/09 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Adaptive optics systems are essential on all large telescopes where image quality is important. These are complex systems with many design parameters requiring optimisation before good performance can be achieved. The simulation of adaptive optics systems is therefore necessary to categorise the expected performance. This paper describes an adaptive optics simulation platform, developed at Durham University, which can be used to simulate adaptive optics systems on the largest proposed future extremely large telescopes (ELTs) as well as current systems. This platform is modular, object oriented and has the benefit of hardware application acceleration which can be used to improve the simulation performance, essential for ensuring that the run time of a given simulation is acceptable. The simulation platform described here can be highly parallelised using parallelisation techniques suited for adaptive optics simulation, whilst still offering the user complete control while the simulation is running. Results from the simulation of a ground layer adaptive optics system are provided as an example to demonstrate the flexibility of this simulation platform.