Adaptive optics on a 3.6-meter telescope - The ADONIS system

ADONIS is an adaptive optics (AO) user friendly instrument offered to the European astronomical community on the ESO 3.6-m telescope at La Silla. It is an ugraded version of COME-ON-PLUS, the VLT AO prototype, which already produced significative astrophysical results in a wide range of fields, from planetology to extragalactic astrophysics. ADONIS is now allowing the astronomer to use adaptive optics as a common user instrument thanks to the implementation of an open artificial intelligence software that handles the large number of parameters needed to optimise the AO correction. We will describe the ADONIS system, including the two dedicated infrared cameras, summarize its performances and discuss the observing procedures.