Laboratory demonstrations of multi-object adaptive optics in the visible on a 10 meter telescope

S. Mark Ammons; Luke Johnson; Edward A. Laag; Renate Kupke; Donald T. Gavel

doi:10.1117/12.790188

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16 July 2008 Laboratory demonstrations of multi-object adaptive optics in the visible on a 10 meter telescope

S. Mark Ammons, Luke Johnson, Edward A. Laag, Renate Kupke, Donald T. Gavel

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Proceedings Volume 7015, Adaptive Optics Systems; 70150C (2008) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.790188
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2008, Marseille, France

Abstract

We have demonstrated MOAO-type atmospheric compensation on a 10 meter telescope at visible wavelengths with the UCO/Lick MCAO/MOAO testbed in the Laboratory for Adaptive Optics at UCSC. We report Strehls of ~20% in R band (658 nm) on-axis and Strehls of ~15% off-axis 25" for a 3D Mauna Kea-type atmosphere with r0 = 15 cm and &Tgr;₀ = 3.5". We show that a tomographic MOAO approach with 5 LGS's in a 50" constellation is sufficient to realize good correction in the visible. Two major improvements to the testbed realized this gain: (1) An upgrade to 64x64 subapertures across a 10 meter pupil (2) and a predictor-corrector wind model. We discuss limitations to wide-field visible light AO on 8-10 meter class telescopes and stress that the tomographic error due to blind modes is frequently the largest field-dependent error. We use a predictor-corrector wind model (Wiberg et al. 2006) to take advantage of windlayer shearing in the atmosphere to reduce the tomographic error over a 50" diameter field. Depending on the validity of the Taylor frozen flow model for individual layers in the real atmosphere, this approach could be more effective than increasing the number of LGS's.

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S. Mark Ammons, Luke Johnson, Edward A. Laag, Renate Kupke, and Donald T. Gavel "Laboratory demonstrations of multi-object adaptive optics in the visible on a 10 meter telescope", Proc. SPIE 7015, Adaptive Optics Systems, 70150C (16 July 2008); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.790188

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