The spectral resolution of a dispersive spectrograph is dependent on the width of the entrance slit. This means that astronomical spectrographs trade-off throughput with spectral resolving power. ...Recently, optical guided-wave transitions known as photonic lanterns have been proposed to circumvent this trade-off, by enabling the efficient reformatting of multimode light into a pseudo-slit which is highly multimode in one axis, but diffraction-limited in the other. Here, we demonstrate the successful reformatting of a telescope point spread function into such a slit using a three-dimensional integrated optical waveguide device, which we name the photonic dicer. Using the CANARY adaptive optics (AO) demonstrator on the William Herschel Telescope, and light centred at 1530 nm with a 160 nm full width at half-maximum, the device shows a transmission of between 10 and 20 per cent depending upon the type of AO correction applied. Most of the loss is due to the overfilling of the input aperture in poor and moderate seeing. Taking this into account, the photonic device itself has a transmission of 57 ± 4 per cent. We show how a fully-optimized device can be used with AO to provide efficient spectroscopy at high spectral resolution.
The performance of a wide-field adaptive optics system depends on input design parameters. Here we investigate the performance of a multiconjugate adaptive optics system design for the European ...Extremely Large Telescope, using an end-to-end Monte Carlo adaptive optics simulation tool, DASP (Durham adaptive optics simulation platform). We consider parameters such as the number of laser guide stars, sodium layer depth, wavefront sensor pixel scale, number of deformable mirrors (DMs), mirror conjugation and actuator pitch. We provide potential areas where costs savings can be made, and investigate trade-offs between performance and cost. We conclude that a six-laser guide star system using three DMs seems to be a sweet spot for performance and cost compromise.
The forthcoming Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) all require adaptive optics systems for their successful operation. The real-time control for these systems becomes computationally challenging, in ...part limited by the memory bandwidths required for wavefront reconstruction. We investigate new POWER8 processor technologies applied to the problem of real-time control for adaptive optics. These processors have a large memory bandwidth, and we show that they are suitable for operation of first-light ELT instrumentation, and propose some potential real-time control system designs. A central processing unit (CPU)-based real-time control system significantly reduces complexity, improves maintainability, and leads to increased longevity for the real-time control system.
Planned instruments utilizing multi-object adaptive optics systems on the forthcoming extremely large telescopes require large numbers of high order deformable mirrors. These devices are a ...significant cost driver, particularly if specifications regarding the number of faulty actuators are stringent. Here, we investigate the effect on adaptive optics performance that such faulty actuators have, and draw conclusions about how far faulty actuator specifications (and hence cost) can be relaxed without having a significant effect on adaptive optics performance. We also provide performance estimates using a map of faulty actuators from an existing deformable mirror. We investigate the effect of faulty actuators using an end-to-end Monte Carlo adaptive optics simulation code. We find that for actuators stuck at a fixed height above the deformable mirror surface, between 1 and 2 per cent of actuators can be faulty before significant performance degradation occurs. For actuators that are a coupled to nearest neighbours, up to about 5 per cent, can be faulty before adaptive optics (AO) performance begins to be affected.
The spectral resolution of a dispersive astronomical spectrograph is limited by the trade-off between throughput and the width of the entrance slit. Photonic guided wave transitions have been ...proposed as a route to bypass this trade-off, by enabling the efficient reformatting of incoherent seeing-limited light collected by the telescope into a linear array of single modes: a pseudo-slit which is highly multimode in one axis but diffraction-limited in the dispersion axis of the spectrograph. It is anticipated that the size of a single-object spectrograph fed with light in this manner would be essentially independent of the telescope aperture size. A further anticipated benefit is that such spectrographs would be free of 'modal noise', a phenomenon that occurs in high-resolution multimode fibre-fed spectrographs due to the coherent nature of the telescope point spread function (PSF). We seek to address these aspects by integrating a multicore fibre photonic lantern with an ultrafast laser inscribed three-dimensional waveguide interconnect to spatially reformat the modes within the PSF into a diffraction-limited pseudo-slit. Using the CANARY adaptive optics (AO) demonstrator on the William Herschel Telescope, and 1530 plus or minus 80 nm stellar light, the device exhibits a transmission of 47-53 per cent depending upon the mode of AO correction applied. We also show the advantage of using AO to couple light into such a device by sampling only the core of the CANARY PSF. This result underscores the possibility that a fully optimized guided-wave device can be used with AO to provide efficient spectroscopy at high spectral resolution.
Astronomical adaptive optics systems with open-loop deformable mirror control have recently come online. In these systems, the deformable mirror surface is not included in the wavefront sensor paths, ...and so changes made to the deformable mirror are not fed back to the wavefront sensors. This gives rise to all sorts of linearity and control issues mainly centred on one question: has the mirror taken the shape requested? Non-linearities in wavefront measurement and in the deformable mirror shape can lead to significant deviations in the mirror shape from the requested shape. Here, wavefront sensor measurements made using a brightest pixel selection method are discussed along with the implications that this has on open-loop AO systems. Discussion includes elongated laser guide star spots and also computational efficiency.
Both lucky imaging techniques and adaptive optics require natural guide stars, limiting sky-coverage, even when laser guide stars are used. Lucky imaging techniques become less successful on larger ...telescopes unless adaptive optics is used, as the fraction of images obtained with well-behaved turbulence across the whole telescope pupil becomes vanishingly small. Here, we introduce a technique combining lucky imaging techniques with tomographic laser guide star adaptive optics systems on large telescopes. This technique does not require any natural guide star for the adaptive optics, and hence offers full sky-coverage adaptive optics correction. In addition, we introduce a new method for lucky image selection based on residual wavefront phase measurements from the adaptive optics wavefront sensors. We perform Monte Carlo modelling of this technique, and demonstrate I-band Strehl ratios of up to 35 per cent in 0.7 arcsec mean seeing conditions with 0.5 m deformable mirror pitch and full adaptive optics sky-coverage. We show that this technique is suitable for use with lucky imaging reference stars as faint as magnitude 18, and fainter if more advanced image selection and centring techniques are used.
Abstract
The Durham adaptive optics real-time controller is a generic, high-performance real-time control system for astronomical adaptive optics systems. It has recently had new features added as ...well as performance improvements, and here we give details of these, as well as ways in which optimizations can be made for specific adaptive optics systems and hardware implementations. We also present new measurements that show how this real-time control system could be used with any existing adaptive optics system, and also show that when used with modern hardware, it has high enough performance to be used with most Extremely Large Telescope adaptive optics systems.
The performance of a wide-field adaptive optics (AO) system depends on input design parameters. Here we investigate the performance of a multi-object AO system design for the European Extremely Large ...Telescope, using an end-to-end Monte Carlo AO simulation tool, Durham adaptive optics simulation platform, with relevance for proposed instruments such as MOSAIC. We consider parameters such as the number of laser guide stars, sodium layer depth, wavefront sensor pixel scale, actuator pitch and natural guide star availability. We provide potential areas where costs savings can be made, and investigate trade-offs between performance and cost, and provide solutions that would enable such an instrument to be built with currently available technology. Our key recommendations include a trade-off for laser guide star wavefront sensor pixel scale of about 0.7 arcsec per pixel, and a field of view of at least 7 arcsec, that electron multiplying CCD technology should be used for natural guide star wavefront sensors even if reduced frame rate is necessary, and that sky coverage can be improved by a slight reduction in natural guide star sub-aperture count without significantly affecting tomographic performance. We find that AO correction can be maintained across a wide field of view, up to 7 arcmin in diameter. We also recommend the use of at least four laser guide stars, and include ground-layer and multi-object AO performance estimates.
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