Abstract

Multiple sodium laser beacons are a crucial development in multi-conjugate adaptive optics systems that offers wide-field diffraction limited adaptive optics correction to the astronomical community. This correction is strongly dependent on the laser beam power and quality, so a beam shaping concept is currently being developed to speed-up calibration and alignment of the laser before every run. A method previously reported, has now been implemented on a laboratory bench using MEMS deformable mirrors. Necessary calibration and characterization of the deformable mirrors are described and the results for experimental amplitude correction are presented.