Books about Adaptive Optics

Here is a small list of books on Adaptive optics. There are not many of them since the subject is quite specific and requires wide and diverce background.

Adaptive Optics for Astronomical Telescopes (Oxford Series in Optical \& Imaging Sciences) by John Hardy
Hardy was a pioneer in adaptive optics and in the 1970s he built the first system capable of compensating the turbulence of a large astronomical telescope at visible wavelengths.

The book is very comprehensive, with an excellent bibliography and outstanding illustrations. The text is informative and consistent, with strong points in atmosphere turbulence and deformable mirrors. As a minor issues I must mention that the control part of adaptive optics is covered less deeply, but enough for the first-time reader. Despite of its age, the book gives all necessary background to enter to adaptive optics field.

The book by Hardy is by far The Best book in adaptive optics.

John W. Hardy, Adaptive optics for astronomical telescopes, Oxford University Press, USA, 1998.


Numerical Simulation of Optical Wave Propagation With Examples in MATLAB, by Jason Schmidt
The book presents the latest advances in numerical simulations of optical wave propagations in turbulent media. The book is clearly written and abundant of excellent examples in MATLAB giving to the reader a lot of step-by-step introductions as well as understanding of the waves propagation. The writing style is very engaging.

However, the Chapter 9 is slightly denser than others (I think it could be split on two different chapters). The operators notations used in Chapter 6 sometimes are more difficult to follow than conventional expressions. But those are minor issues that do not affect the material of the book.

Overall, the material of the book and the MATLAB code present a solid basis for the numerical simulations. Carefully selected bibliography of the book allows to use it as an excellent reference.


Jason D. Schmidt, Numerical Simulation of Optical Wave Propagation, With Examples in Matlab, Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, 2010.



Adaptive Optics in Astronomy by Francois Roddier
This is a very good example of how one should NOT write a book. This is not even a book but just a draft of several conference proceedings meshed together. There is no transition between chapters, the writing skills of different authors are very different and it is quite annoying.

For instance, in chapter about numerical simulations you will find NOTHING about how to really simulate the AO systems: no sinlge formula or plot. Chapter about ``theoretical'' background is written in a manner that there actually is a solid theory behind it - and most formulas are starting with numercial coefficient, which is improssible to get theoretically.

The second part of book is just a outdate garbage: stories of how the author built telescopes, with unnecessary detailed information that is useless now.

Don't waste your time on it.


Adaptive optics handbook by R.Tyson
The following books is by R. Tyson. Personally, I think that reading books from Tyson is mostly waste of time. He is like bakery that produces books as they are cakes. Very few useful information. More pity is that Tyson is a non-stop-backery than stamps and stamps books, one worse than other.