To be clear in my previous post and comments on AO I was referencing to amateur AO units, not to professional ones.
Although if some units in the market claim they can reach correction rates as large as 50Hz, in reality it is not enough for seeing compensation and sledom possible unless you have a very bright star (or laser made artificial star) in your scope FOV and for that matter a large aperture scope.
Even then isoplanatic patch size will limit seeing corrections to at most 10" or so near the guide star. Further away you start to make things worse.
Above 1 meter scope aperture tilt/tip seeing correction is not enough, and you need to locally change the scope mirror to account for wavefront deformation across the all aperture.
In my opinion amateur AO units should be called image stabilizers instead, this will be much closer to the reality.
Seeing is reduced in NIR. 23% or so does not seem a lot but extreme deviations from average become less frequent. This is not a linear effect either.
Most mounts are difficult to correct fast accurately, due to mechanical limitations (such as inertia) and/or communication protocol time lags and quantization effects (from legacy or poor designs, the right setting does matter here).
Problem is most mounts exhibit "fast", some time erratic, (one second time scale) mechanical errors. Those could be large enough to impact the image quality and require "fast" correction too, which is difficult to do with guide star seeing on your way.
AO will help in such case and reducing guide star seeing is always a good idea. Algorithms and processing can do so much, raw data quality always will matter.
At the end auto-guiding and other astro-photography tricks are challenging tasks, it is where science and "art" meet. Human experience does matter and this is not a bad thing, at least from my point of view:-)
The ONAG(R) technology has been designed to improve the process but certainly does not solve and fix all the issues alone.
Our customers feedback talked for themselves, however if there is somebody here who wants to design and conduct an experiment in a even more scientific matter I would be very happy to help in such quest.
I am always opened for criticism, constructive comments, suggestion, ideas, ..., for improving products and end user experiences, nothing is perfect. After all we all do share the same passion.
