Un-twinkling the stars, and enabling super-human vision.

Adaptive Optics are systems that correct time-varying distortions in a telescope image that are caused by atmospheric turbulence. They are also used to correct distortions caused by the lens of the eye in microscopes that study human vision, see e.g. Kurczynski et al. 2001, Proc. of SPIE 4561 147.

As a post doc at Bell Labs, I designed and fabricated devices for adaptive optics (incl. US Patents #6,639,710 and #7,126,742) and assembled a laboratory adaptive optics system that operated these devices, see e.g. Kurczynski et al. 2006, Optics Express 14 509.

The software included here consists of the closed-loop control system (in Tcl/Tk), mathematical stability analysis code (in C) and a wavefront simulation GUI (in C++). The stability analysis code is generic C and can be compiled and executed on any operating system. The other projects have specific hardware and operating system dependencies.