Integrating deformable mirrors within the optical train of an adaptive telescope was one of the major innovations in astronomical observation technology, distinguished by its high optical throughput, reduced optical surfaces, and the incorporation of the deformable mirror. Typically, voice-coil actuators are used, which require additional position sensors, internal control electronics, and cooling systems, leading to a very complex structure. Piezoelectric deformable secondary mirror technologies were proposed to overcome these problems. Recently, a high-order piezoelectric deformable secondary mirror has been developed and installed on the 1.8-m telescope at Lijiang Observatory in China to make it an adaptive telescope. The system consists of a 241-actuator piezoelectric deformable secondary mirror, a 192-sub-aperture Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, and a multi-core-based real-time controller. The actuator spacing of the PDSM measures 19.3 mm, equivalent to approximately 12.6 cm when mapped onto the primary mirror, significantly less than the voice-coil-based adaptive telescopes such as LBT, Magellan and VLT. As a result, stellar images with Strehl ratios above 0.49 in the R band have been obtained. To our knowledge, these are the highest R band images captured by an adaptive telescope with deformable secondary mirrors. Here, we report the system description and on-sky performance of this adaptive telescope.

A prototype of a solar ground-layer adaptive optics (GLAO) system, which consists of a multi-direction correlating Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor with 30 effective subapertures and about a 1 arcmin field of view (FoV) in each subaperture, a deformable mirror with 151 actuators conjugated to the telescope entrance pupil, and a custom-built real-time controller based on field-programmable gate array and multi-core digital signal processor (DSP), is implemented at the 1 m New Vacuum Solar Telescope at Fuxian Solar Observatory and saw its first light on January 12th, 2016. The on-sky observational results show that the solar image is apparently improved in the whole FoV over 1 arcmin with the GLAO correction.

A second generation solar adaptive optics (AO) system is built and installed at the 1-m New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST) of the Fuxian Solar Observatory (FSO) in 2015. The AO high-order correction system consists of a 151-element deformable mirror (DM), a correlating Shack–Hartmann (SH) wavefront sensor (WFS) with a 3500 Hz frame rate, and a real-time controller. The system saw first light on Mar. 16, 2015. The simultaneous high-resolution photosphere and chromosphere images with AO are obtained. The on-sky observational results show that the contrast and resolution of the images are apparently improved after the wavefront correction by AO.