On-sky wide field adaptive optics correction using multiple laser guide stars at the MMT
Abstract
We describe results from the first astronomical adaptive optics system to use multiple laser guide stars, located at the 6.5-m MMT telescope in Arizona. Its initial operational mode, ground-layer adaptive optics (GLAO), provides uniform stellar wavefront correction within the 2 arc minute diameter laser beacon constellation, reducing the stellar image widths by as much as 53%, from 0.70 to 0.33 arc seconds at lambda = 2.14 microns. GLAO is achieved by applying a correction to the telescope's adaptive secondary mirror that is an average of wavefront measurements from five laser beacons supplemented with image motion from a faint stellar source. Optimization of the adaptive optics system in subsequent commissioning runs will further improve correction performance where it is predicted to deliver 0.1 to 0.2 arc second resolution in the near-infrared during a majority of seeing conditions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0812.0352,
title = {On-sky wide field adaptive optics correction using multiple laser guide stars at the MMT},
author = {Christoph Baranec and Michael Hart and N. Mark Milton and Thomas Stalcup and Keith Powell and Miguel Snyder and Vidhya Vaitheeswaran and Don McCarthy and Craig Kulesa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0812.0352},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
13 pages, 1 table, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal. Expected March 2009