Adaptive Optics Facility: from an amazing present to a brilliant future...

The Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF) is an ESO project, which transformed Yepun, one of the four 8m telescopes in Paranal, into an adaptive telescope. This has been done by replacing the conventional secondary mirror of Yepun by a Deformable Secondary Mirror (DSM) and attaching four Laser Guide Stars (LGS) Units to its centerpiece. Additionally, two Adaptive Optics (AO) modules (GALACSI serving MUSE a 3D spectrograph, and GRAAL, serving Hawk I a wide field infrared imager) have been assembled onto the telescope Nasmyth adapters, each of them incorporating four LGS WaveFront Sensors (WFS) and one tip-tilt sensor used to control the DSM at 1 kHz frame rate. The complete AOF is installed on Yepun for more than one year now, and its commissioning is fully complete. This paper presents the most important and amazing features of the AOF, illustrated by some first science images obtained using MUSE/GALACSI in Ground Layer AO (GLAO) and Laser Tomography AO (LTAO) mode, and HAWK-I/GRAAL in GLAO mode. In the first part of the paper, on-sky performance of GRAAL and GALACSI is presented in terms of gain in image quality and even Strehl Ratio. Efficiency of the on-sky operation of the AOF is described. In the second part, future instruments making use of the AOF capabilities are presented.