CENTER FOR COMPUTATIONAL MATHEMATICS COLLOQUIUM

                  UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT DENVER



TITLE:   Mathematics applied to large telescopes -  the VLT
 

SPEAKER: Ed Friedman and Mike Lieber, Ball Aerospace, Boulder
         

DATE:    Monday, March 3, 1997


PLACE:   Math Conference Room 626 
         UCD Building, 1250 14th St., Denver


TIME:    noon (Refreshments served at 11:45 am) 



ABSTRACT

The new generation of large telescopes are dependent upon active control and 
signal processing techniques to achieve good imaging.  Due to a 
combination of disturbances to the imaging process, such as the atmosphere, 
and manufacturing difficulty, the new telescopes with 4 - 10 m diameter 
require adaptive changes to the optical system in the form of deformable 
mirrors and mirrors which can be tilted and translated.  This talk will 
discuss the degradation in images caused by the atmosphere and the optics 
and how with signal processing and active control these effects are 
corrected.  An example will be shown of algorithms developed for the 8m Very 
Large Telescope  (VLT) project in Chile, to extract and correct image 
aberations.