Adaptive Optics Telescope Simulator

Ground-based telescopes don't just fight diffraction — they fight the sky itself. Turbulent, unevenly heated pockets of air distort an incoming starlight wavefront by the time it reaches the mirror, spreading a point-like star into a blurry "seeing disk" that no amount of aperture alone can fix. This simulator renders a live optical-path-difference map across the telescope's pupil, driven by a frozen-flow turbulence model that drifts across the aperture at a wind speed you control, and shows the resulting star image forming at the focal plane in real time. Switch between no correction, tip-tilt-only correction and full multi-actuator adaptive optics to watch the Strehl ratio climb and the residual wavefront error collapse — the same trade-offs that drove the design of every modern adaptive-optics observatory.