Observational tests of ground layer wavefront recovery have been made in open
loop using a constellation of four natural guide stars at the 1.55 m Kuiper
telescope in Arizona. Such tests explore the effectiveness of wide-field seeing
improvement by correction of low-lying atmospheric turbulence with ground-layer
adaptive optics (GLAO). The wavefronts from the four stars were measured
simultaneously on a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (WFS). The WFS placed a 5 x
5 array of square subapertures across the pupil of the telescope, allowing for
wavefront reconstruction up to the fifth radial Zernike order. We find that the
wavefront aberration in each star can be roughly halved by subtracting the
average of the wavefronts from the other three stars. Wavefront correction on
this basis leads to a reduction in width of the seeing-limited stellar image by
up to a factor of 3, with image sharpening effective from the visible to near
infrared wavelengths over a field of at least 2 arc minutes. We conclude that
GLAO correction will be a valuable tool that can increase resolution and
spectrographic throughput across a broad range of seeing-limited observations.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, to be published in Astrophys.