English

Development of image motion compensation system for 1.3 m telescope at Vainu Bappu Observatory

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2019-08-30 v1

Abstract

We developed a tip-tilt system to compensate the turbulence induced image motion for 1.3 m telescope at Vainu Bappu Observatory, Kavalur. The instrument is designed to operate at visible wavelength band (480-700 nm) with a field of view 1×11^{\prime}\times1^{\prime}. The tilt corrected images have shown up to \approx 57% improvement in image resolution and a corresponding peak intensity increase by a factor of \approx 2.8. A closed-loop correction bandwidth of \approx 26 Hz has been achieved with on-sky tests and the root mean square motion of the star image has been reduced by a factor of \sim 14. These results are consistent with theoretical and numerical predictions of wave-front aberrations caused by atmospheric turbulence and image quality improvement expected from a real-time control system. In this paper, we present the details of the instrument design, laboratory calibration studies and quantify its performance on the telescope.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.11027,
  title  = {Development of image motion compensation system for 1.3 m telescope at Vainu Bappu Observatory},
  author = {Sreekanth Reddy and Ravinder Kumar Banyal and Sridharan R and P U Kamath and Aishwarya Selvaraj},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.11027},
  year   = {2019}
}