Question: How is your work with telescopes going?

Nazim Bharmal answered on 14 Mar 2012:

Working with telescopes is difficult for lots of practical reasons: we develop instruments which means engineering on the telescope that makes using it for astronomy harder, so we have to negotiate with astronomers who want to use it for taking pictures; we have to travel to Spain which isn’t that cheap and takes time to prepare all the equipment and send it out (sometimes months in advance); and when we are there, if something doesn’t work quite right, it isn’t easy to get it fixed on the night.

So it goes slowly but we have just managed to successfully fire 4 laser beams into the sky from the telescope (we use a baby telescope attached to the main mirror). We then managed to measure the ‘twinkling’ from those lasers beams at the same time that we measured the ‘twinkling’ from a star. Back in Durham, we are going to check that these give the same measurements.

Then in July, we are going to try and put it all together and use the laser measurements to control a special mirror that cancels out the twinkling in the star. When this type of Adaptive Optics works (!), we can then use the system to see stars far more clearly without worrying about how bright the star is, which is a current problem with our Adaptive Optics systems.