The Max-Planck institutes for astronomy (MPIA) and for extraterrestrial physics (MPE) run an adaptive optics (AO) system with a laser guide star at the 3.5 m telescope on Calar Alto, Spain. This system, called ALFA, produces now scientific results and works ex- cellent with natural guide stars (NGS) as faint as 13th magnitude in R-band. The ultimate goal however is to achieve similar performances with the laser guide star (LGS) which is faint and extended. We introduce the Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor implemented in ALFA and present our efforts in increasing its sensitivity by using advanced centroiding and wavefront reconstruction algorithms.
@article{arxiv.1607.05575,
title = {Increasing the sensitivity of a Shack-Hartmann sensor},
author = {Markus Kasper and Douglas Looze and Stefan Hippler and Ric Davies and Andreas Glindemann},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.05575},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
6 pages, 12 figures, Canterbury conference on wavefront sensing and its applications, Canterbury, England, 1999