Night view of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory and CANARY's laser guide star being launched from the GHRIL laboratory at the William Herschel Telescope. Credit: Ryan Brothwell (QUB) [ JPEG ].

CANARY is an open-loop Adaptive Optics system deployed on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope from July 2010. CANARY uses multiple laser guide stars and deformable mirrors and will be the instrument that provides the first on-sky test of combined wide-field LGS tomography and open-loop AO control. On-sky validation of these combined techniques will be performed with the goal of emulating a single channel of the proposed E-ELT MOAO instrument, EAGLE, albeit at 1/10th scale. The EAGLE webpages contain many examples of the type of science that could be performed with such an MOAO instrument on the E-ELT.

More information: CANARY web site