Adaptive Optics Science with the MMT Adaptive Secondary: Mid-IR AO Imaging of the Post-AGB Star AC Her

The world’s first adaptive secondary has been commissioned at the 6.5m MMT. Early science results suggests that it is unique and highly productive. Nearly diffraction-limited 0.07” H band images have been obtained of the Trapezium core [Close et al. 2003b]. Moreover, an adaptive secondary makes low emissivity Mid-IR (8-20 micron) AO science possible for the first time. We have obtained the first Mid-IR AO results with Strehls of ~100% from 8-20 microns. The very high PSF stability at such Strehls has allowed us to rule out any extended (>0.2′′) structure around the post-AGB stars AC Her and Alpha Her [Close et al. 2003c]. In addition, Biller et al. (2003) has used this PSF stability to obtain super-resolutions through deconvolution. The resulting 0.1” images of the AGB star RV Boo detects a dust disk for the first time [Biller et al. 2003].