McMath-Pierce Adaptive Optics

16-millisecond exposures of a sunspot at a wavelength of 990 nanometers, without (left) and with (right) adaptive optics. Both images were filtered with an unsharp mask to compress the large intensity range, and both are displayed at identical contrast. The image to the left was already among the sharpest images ever recorded without adaptive optics. This successful low-cost system on the McMath-Pierce solar telescope is expected to be available for general use in 2003 (see the September 2002 NOAO Newsletter, currently only available in PDF format).