Ground-based telescopes suffer from a loss of image quality away from the diffractionlimited resolution. Light from a science target travels through the atmosphere and encounters turbulence, which distorts the wavefront causing aberrations, commonly corrected by employing an Adaptive Optics (AO) system. This thesis outlines the method for building a prototype AO system for a 0.61 m diameter primary mirror telescope at Mount John. Previous work by Liu et al. demonstrated a 16.7% correction using a tip/tilt mirror system. In this thesis, a study of the environmental and design parameters is conducted using the end-to-end simulation tool Octopus, developed by scientists at the European Southern Observatory. The AO system is simulated for expected conditions and parameters based on the three-layer atmospheric model developed by Mohr, Johnston, and Cottrell for Mount John and the available wavefront sensors and deformable mirrors at the University of Canterbury.

Simulation results suggest that the AO system can improve Strehl ratios above the seeing conditions at K and V bands under atmospheric conditions characterised by Fried parameters of 7 - 12 cm. The selected Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SH WFS) should be operated to achieve the smallest latency, with the maximum achievable frame rate of 880 fps in high-speed mode, allowing Strehl improvements when there is a minimum guide star flux of 10 photons/subaperture/frame at K band and 50 photons/subaperture/frame at V band.

Initial laboratory testing shows that the AO prototype provides significant correction of lower-order modes. The Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM) of the Point Spread Function (PSF) shows improvement from the open loop FWHM when static aberration modes are applied. In particular, the defocus and astigmatism modes provide the best improvement in FWHM from the open loop FWHM for a given rms input aberration. Therefore, the prototype AO build is successful in the correction from the third to the tenth Zernike aberration mode. However, the analysis of an evolving generated atmospheric screen using Taylor’s Frozen Flow Hypothesis requires a Fried parameter of 30 - 40 cm to close the loop. Thus, the Thorlabs Deformable Mirror (DM) is unsuitable for on-sky operation at Mount John Observatory since it saturates for atmospheres characterised by a Fried parameter of 7 - 12 cm. Preliminary on-sky testing suggests that the wavefront sensor is insufficiently sensitive for on-sky use in the current optical configuration.