MagAO is the new adaptive optics system with visible-light and infrared science cameras, located on the 6.5-m Magellan "Clay" telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. The instrument locks on natural guide stars (NGS) from 0th to 16thR-band magnitude, measures turbulence with a modulating pyramid wavefront sensor binnable from 28x28 to 7x7 subapertures, and uses a 585-actuator adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) to provide flat wavefronts to the two science cameras. MagAO is a mutated clone of the similar AO systems at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) at Mt. Graham, Arizona. The high-level AO loop controls up to 378 modes and operates at frame rates up to 1000 Hz. The instrument has two science cameras: VisAO operating from 0.5-1 μm and Clio2 operating from 1-5 μm. MagAO was installed in 2012 and successfully completed two commissioning runs in 2012-2013. In April 2014 we had our first science run that was open to the general Magellan community. Observers from Arizona, Carnegie, Australia, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, and Chile took observations in collaboration with the MagAO instrument team. Here we describe the MagAO instrument, describe our on-sky performance, and report our status as of summer 2014.
@article{arxiv.1407.5098,
title = {MagAO: Status and on-sky performance of the Magellan adaptive optics system},
author = {Katie M. Morzinski and Laird M. Close and Jared R. Males and Derek Kopon and Phil M. Hinz and Simone Esposito and Armando Riccardi and Alfio Puglisi and Enrico Pinna and Runa Briguglio and Marco Xompero and Fernando Quirós-Pacheco and Vanessa Bailey and Katherine B. Follette and T. J. Rodigas and Ya-Lin Wu and Carmelo Arcidiacono and Javier Argomedo and Lorenzo Busoni and Tyson Hare and Alan Uomoto and Alycia Weinberger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.5098},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
13 pages, 11 figures, to appear in Proc. SPIE 9148-3