5 days ago · The prime objective of the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument for the VLT is the discovery and study of new extra-solar giant planets orbiting nearby stars by direct imaging of their circumstellar environment.

4 days ago · ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) is a flagship facility for European ground-based astronomy. It is one of the world's most advanced optical telescopes, consisting of four Unit Telescopes with main mirrors of 8.2m diameter and four …

MAVIS is an instrument being built for the ESO’s VLT AOF (Adaptive Optics Facility, UT4 Yepun). MAVIS stands for MCAO Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph.

6 days ago · In the VLT/MAVIS image, clumpy regions as faint as 29th AB mag are detected with a signal-to-noise-ratio 5. Adaptive Optics (AO) is a technique to compensate quickly varying optical aberrations in an optical system. In astronomy, telescope images from astronomical objects are blurred by atmospheric turbulence.

Apr 20, 2023 · The Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) is a new adaptive optics (AO) instrument installed at the Cassegrain focus of the 8.2-m VLT-UT4 telescope at ESO Paranal Observatory in...

Oct 15, 2017 · Abstract page for arXiv paper 1710.05417: Performance of the extreme-AO instrument VLT/SPHERE and dependence on the atmospheric conditions SPHERE is the high-contrast exoplanet imager and spectrograph installed at the …

It is fed with an extreme adaptive optics (AO) system called SAXO (Sphere Ao for eXoplanet Observation). It operates at a frequency up to 1.38 kHz on bright targets with a 40x40 spatially ltered Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (WFS) and a …

Jan 27, 2021 · MAVIS (MCAO-Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph) is an instrument proposed for the VLT Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF), which is currently in the phase-A conceptual design study. It will be the first instrument performing Multi-conjugate adaptive optics at visible wavelengths, enabling a new set of science observations.

For its Very Large Telescope (VLT) the European Southern Observatory (ESO) developed several sophisticated adaptive optics systems. One of them is MACAO - the Multi Application Curvature AO - which is installed at the Coudé focus of all four unit telescopes and in the VLT Interferometer, i.e. six units in total.

We propose a feasibility study for an extreme AO system in the frame of the SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetry High-contrast Exoplanet Research) instrument, which is currently under design and should equip one of the four VLT 8-m telescopes in 2010.