Reliable, autonomously, deployment of telescopes enables a wide range of possible science cases. In this paper, we present a method for multi-stage telescope alignment with a simple commercial imaging sensor. For these studies, we use a design of an example three mirror anastigmat telescope and consider how the average spot size across the detector changes as a function of primary and secondary mirror positioning. This multi-stage alignment procedure will consist of three subprocesses, starting with a coarse alignment and converging down to a finer alignment before moving on to a stage where the telescope will refine its misalignments for data acquisition. This alignment strategy has been tested and meets diffraction limited requirements on a subset of misalignment cases from a statistical Monte Carlo simulation given misalignment tolerances on the telescope.
@article{arxiv.2508.19338,
title = {Stages of commissioning alignment for three-mirror anastigmat (TMA) telescopes},
author = {Solvay Blomquist and Heejoo Choi and Hyukmo Kang and Hayden Kim and Kevin Derby and Pierre Nicolas and Joanna Rosenbluth and Patrick Ingraham and Ewan S. Douglas and Daewook Kim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.19338},
year = {2025}
}