1st AO4ELT conference, 22-26 June 2009, Paris

Organized by Observatoire de Paris (LESIA and GEPI) and ONERA in the framework of their Phase parternship, the first international conference on Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes took place in Paris from 22 to 26 June 2009. It received 183 registered participants to attend the 63 oral presentations and 40 posters.

Topics

Adaptive optics is one of the major challenges in building the future extremely large telescopes. New developments have already started for instrument pathfinders and will be needed in several areas, such as mirrors, laser technologies, wavefront sensing, control and command, driven by the scientific requirements. New post-processing tools will also be required to increase the image quality and increase the scientific return of the instruments.

In that framework, the main conference goal was to gather international AO specialists (and especially young researchers) in order to share and to exchange around subjects and specificities related to the application of AO on giant telescopes. Hence the conference addressed the nine following topics with a dedicated session for each of them:

 Astrophysical needs and high level requirements for AO on ELTs
 AO systems and instrumental concepts
 Laser guide stars
 Wave front sensing
 Real-time control
 Deformable mirrors
 AO simulations
 Post processing
 Pathfinders

Important dates

15 Sept.: deadline for the authors to send their article to the LOC (to be submitted here)

15 Sept.: deadline to answer the poll (available here) to choose the proceedings type (book, CD or online)

Conference poster