The European Southern Observatory (ESO), and TOPTICA Projects GmbH celebrated the completion of the last laser source for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) today. The ceremony took place at TOPTICA headquarters near Munich.
The ELT, ESO’s new flagship astronomical telescope, currently under construction in Chile’s Atacama desert, will be equipped with six powerful lasers that will excite sodium atoms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, creating artificial reference stars. These ‘stars’ will be used to measure the blurring and scintillation caused by the atmosphere, so that the ELT’s deformable mirrors can correct for it. This technology, known as adaptive optics, allows astronomers to take remarkably sharp images through Earth’s atmosphere.
Three further laser sources were completed for the GRAVITY+ upgrade at ESO’s VLT, also based in the Atacama desert in Chile. Find out more about our SodiumStar guide star laser systems here.
Read more on the ESO website: https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann24016/
