Found 19 talks width keyword adaptive optics

In collaboration with member states institutes, the use of the synergies with ESO is producing first important results in the R&D for Laser Guide Star adaptive optics, to be used for the large and extremely large telescope projects.

In this talk we will report on the preliminary results of the current campaign on LGS return flux with laser guide stars at Observatorio de el Teide and the foreseen tests of the EELT LGS-AO scheme, to be done at the WHT starting in summer 2016. An outlook will be given on the proposal for further feasibility tests at WHT in 2018-19, to experiment novel LGS-AO schemes using uplink beam correction and pyramid wavefront sensing. The demonstration is for a LGS-AO scheme giving high Strehl on the EELT and adaptive optics in the visible on 8m class telescopes.

In the past years, intensive Site Characterization campaigns have been performed to chose the sites for the future giant ELTs. Various atmospheric turbulence profilers with different resolution and sensed altitude ranges have been used, as well as climatological tools and satellite data analysis. Mixing long term statistics at low altitude resolution with high resolution data collected during short term campaigns allows to produce the reference profiles as input to the Adaptive Optics (AO) instrument performance estimators. In this talk I will perform a brief review of the principal and most used instruments and tools in order to give to the audience a panorama of the work and the efforts to monitor the atmospheric turbulence for astronomical purposes.

Adaptive optics systems rely on a real-time control system which is responsible for receiving wavefront sensor information and computing and applying the necessary correction to the deformable mirrors. Historically, real-time control systems have relied on customised hardware comprised of multiple FPGA and DSP systems, which high complexity. More recently it has been demonstrated that conventional PCs are now sufficiently powerful to to perform this task. In this talk, I will present an open-source real-time control system, DARC, discuss its implementation on the CANARY AO system at the William Herschel Telescope, and cover the algorithms available. Extension to ELT-scale operation will be discussed, including hardware and detector considerations. The internal architecture of this modular system will be presented, with a case being made for its suitability for implementation on any AO system type, on any telescope.

One of the challenges in solar astronomical observations is the lack of high resolution observations over a wide FOV. Adaptive optics (AO) systems, which are routinely used in current solar telescopes, can only provide successful correction over a narrow FOV. Multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) systems attempt to address this issue and provide correction over a much wider FOV. It will become a key technology in the next generation of solar telescopes, such as the EST and DKIST. At this time, there is no fully operational solar MCAO system in operation. Work is under way at several solar facilities like the NST (Ø1.6m, BBSO) and GREGOR (Ø1.5m, KIS) to build prototype solar MCAO
systems. There is also a significant investigative effort at the IAC to study the design and operation of a solar MCAO system (proper location of the DMs and WFS, appropriated sensing for an extended object,
communication between different WFS, convenient reconstruction method). This talk will provide a review of the current state of solar MCAO, concentrating on solar MCAO simulation efforts under development
at the National Solar Observatory.

ESO is an intergovernmental organization for astronomy founded in 1962 by five countries. It currently has 14 Member States in Europe with Brazil poised to join as soon as the Accession Agreement has been ratified. Together these countries represent approximately 30 percent of the world’s astronomers. ESO operates optical/infrared observatories on La Silla and Paranal in Chile, partners in the sub-millimeter radio observatories APEX and ALMA on Chajnantor and is about to start construction of the Extremely Large Telescope on Armazones.

La Silla hosts various robotic telescopes and experiments as well as the NTT and the venerable 3.6m telescope. The former had a key role in the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe and the latter hosts the ultra-stable spectrograph HARPS which is responsible for the discovery of nearly two-thirds of all confirmed exoplanets with masses below that of Neptune. On Paranal the four 8.2m units of the Very Large Telescope, the Interferometer and the survey telescopes VISTA and VST together constitute an integrated system which supports 16 powerful facility instruments, including adaptive-optics-assisted imagers and integral-field spectrographs, with half a dozen more on the way and the Extremely Large Telescope with its suite of instruments to be added to this system in about ten years time. Scientific highlights include the characterisation of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre, the first image of an exoplanet, studies of gamma-ray bursts enabled by the Rapid Response Mode and milliarcsec imaging of evolved stars and active galactic nuclei. The single dish APEX antenna, equipped with spectrometers and wide-field cameras, contributes strongly to the study of high-redshift galaxies and of star- and planet-formation. Early Science results obtained with the ALMA interferometer already demonstrate its tremendous potential for observations of the cold Universe.

CANARY is a technical demonstrator for the proposed EAGLE instrument for European ELT. EAGLE will have twenty Integral Field Units patrolling a 5 arcminute field and requires a new form of adaptive optics to provide the required image quality for its 0.0375 arcsec image sampling: Laser Guide Star Multi-Object AO. This entails several significant technical innovations: open-loop control, atmospheric tomography, and new calibration methods. The CANARY demonstrator is currently in its first, natural guide star, phase, and the first results have been obtained on sky. CANARY Phase A is described and the first results are presented. The next, laser guide star, phase is then outlined.