Abstract

Because the sky is insufficiently populated with bright natural guide stars to cover all high angular resolution programs using adaptive optics, the concept of artificial guide star was proposed to overcome this difficulty1,2: A laser guide star (LGS) is created by the atmospherically scattered light of a laser beam directed towards the object of interest. Successful results have been recently reported by Fugate et al.3 and Primmerman et al.4. Two types of backscattering effect are considered:

1) Rayleigh and Mie scattering from molecules and dust generating LGS at altitude between 5 and 18 km.

2) Resonance scattering from the sodium atoms around 90 km altitude.

© 1996 Optical Society of America