Imaging and treatment of the PSF in AO instruments: Application to NACO

Abstract

After about 15 years of operation with astronomical instruments, adaptive optics has now reached maturity: it is routinely used at several large telescopes and transparent for the astronomer. Though, adaptive optics assisted images have specificities compared to seeing-limited images, such as their point spread function profile or spatial/temporal variability, that I review in the following. Adaptive optics imaging, unlike seeing-limited imaging, offers the possibility to calibrate the PSF simultaneously to the scientific observations, using real-time measurements of the adaptive optics system itself. I introduce here this PSF reconstruction and review the different PSF reconstruction algorithms developed till now, in particular the one for NAOS. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.