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Laser guide star wavefront sensing comes with several limitations. When imaged with a Shack– Hartmann wavefront sensor, the laser guide star is seen as extended sources elongated in the directions given by the lenslet locations and the laser axis. A test bed has been built in the Adaptive Optics Laboratory of the University of Victoria that reproduces this effect as seen on extremely large telescopes. A new wavefront sensing algorithm, the matched filter, has been implemented and its performance assessed with the test bed. Its ability to mitigate laser guide star aberrations by tracking the sodium layer fluctuations in a closed loop adaptive optics system is shown.

In an adaptive optics system with an undersampled Shack-Hartmann wave-front sensor (WFS), variations in seeing, laser guide star quality, and sodium layer thickness and range distance all combine to vary WFS centroid gain across the pupil during an exposure. While using the minimum of 4 pixels per WFS subaperture improves frame rate and read noise, the WFS centroid gain uncertainty may introduce static aberrations and degrade servo loop phase margin. We present a novel method to estimate and compensate WFS gains of each subaperture individually in real time for both natural and laser guide stars.