Morphology of distant galaxies with MCAO

To understand the physical processes taking place in galaxy formation and evolution, the ability to obtain resolved spectroscopy and images across the objects is a must. Distant galaxies are marginally resolved in seeing-limited conditions and Adaptive Optics (AO) is required. Most of the current extra-galactic AO studies are however constrained by the number of targets available to AO correction (the so-called sky coverage), and the need for statistics, that requires observing many objects across the largest possible field. These constraints are now significantly reduced by the new Wide Field AO systems, like GeMS, the Gemini MCAO system. In this paper, we try to understand the impact of the AO-PSF on the galaxies' morphology analysis accuracy. For this, we use realistic simulated data in order to assess the morphological parameters, taking into account partial PSF knowledge. This allows us to define the critical parameters of the MCAO PSF affecting the analysis accuracy.