Multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO), consisting of several deformable mirrors (DMs),

can significantly increase the adaptive optics (AO) correction field of view. Current MCAO can berealized by either star-oriented or layer-oriented approaches. For solar AO, ground-layer adaptive optics (GLAO) can be viewed as an extreme case of layer-oriented MCAO in which the DM is conjugated to the ground, while solar tomography adaptive optics (TAO) that we proposed recently can be viewed as star-oriented MCAO with only one DM. Solar GLAO and TAO use the same hardware as conventional solar AO, and therefore it will be important to see which method can deliver better performance.

In this article, we compare the performance of solar GLAO and TAO by using end-to-end numerical simulation software. Numerical simulations of TAO and GLAO with different numbers of guide stars are conducted.

Our results show that TAO and GLAO produce the same performance if the DM is conjugated to the ground, but TAO can only generate better performance when the DM is conjugated to the best height.

This result has important application in existing one-DM solar AO systems.