Related papers: Effects of Mirror Seeing on High-Contrast Adaptive…
Thermal effects are already important in currently operating interferometric gravitational wave detectors. Planned upgrades of these detectors involve increasing optical power to combat quantum shot noise. We consider the ramifications of…
We present a simple method of extracting a small number of reference optical turbulence and wind profiles from a large dataset for single conjugate and extreme adaptive optics simulations. These reference profiles can be used in slow…
We have performed a detailed investigation of geophysical constraints on the possible admixture of mirror matter inside the Earth. On the basis of the Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM) -- the `Standard Model' of the Earth's interior…
The challenges of high contrast imaging (HCI) for detecting exoplanets for both ground and space applications can be met with extreme adaptive optics (ExAO), a high-order adaptive optics system that performs wavefront sensing (WFS) and…
The Adaptive Optics (AO) performance significantly depends on the available Natural Guide Stars (NGSs) and a wide range of atmospheric conditions (seeing, Cn2, windspeed,...). In order to be able to easily predict the AO performance, we…
Sites for next-generation telescopes are chosen decades before the first light of a telescope. Site selection is usually based on recent measurements over a period that is too short to account for long-term changes in observing conditions…
Over the last two decades the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) has been something of a test-bed for methods aimed at obtaining accurate time-domain relative photometry within highly crowded fields. Difference imaging methods, originally pioneered…
This article reports on the results of simulations conducted to assess the performance of a modal Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) system on a 10m telescope with one Deformable Mirror (DM) conjugated to the telescope pupil and a…
SPHERE is the high-contrast exoplanet imager and spectrograph installed at the Unit Telescope 3 of the Very Large Telescope. After more than two years of regular operations, we analyse statistically the performance of the adaptive optics…
Global MCAO aims to exploit a very wide technical field of view to find AO-suitable NGSs, with the goal to increase the overall sky coverage. The concept foresees the use of numerical entities, called Virtual Deformable Mirrors, to deal…
Thermal noise is expected to be the dominant source of noise in the most sensitive frequency band of second generation ground based gravitational wave detectors. Reshaping the beam to a flatter wider profile which probes more of the mirror…
The Gemini Multi-conjugate adaptive optics System (GeMS) at the Gemini South telescope in Cerro Pach{\'o}n is the first sodium-based multi-Laser Guide Star (LGS) adaptive optics system. It uses five LGSs and two deformable mirrors to…
HIRES, a high resolution spectrometer, is one of the first five instruments foreseen in the ESO roadmap for the E-ELT. This spectrograph should ideally provide full spectral coverage from the UV limit to 2.5 microns, with a resolving power…
The exoplanetary science through direct imaging and spectroscopy will largely expand with the forthcoming development of new instruments at the VLT (SPHERE), Gemini (GPI), Subaru (HiCIAO), and Palomar (Project 1640) observatories. All these…
A fundamental limit to the sensitivity of optical interferometers is imposed by Brownian thermal fluctuations of the mirrors' surfaces. This thermal noise can be reduced by using larger beams which "average out" the random fluctuations of…
Optical turbulence, driven by fluctuations of the atmospheric refractive index, poses a significant challenge to ground-based optical systems, as it distorts the propagation of light. This degradation affects both astronomical observations…
Long-term stability of deformable mirrors (DM) is a critical performance requirement for instruments requiring open-loop corrections. The effects of temperature changes in the DM performance are equally critical for such instruments. This…
The contrast performance of current eXtreme Adaptive Optics (XAO) systems can be improved by adding a second AO correction stage featuring its own wavefront sensor, deformable mirror, and real-time controller. We develop a dynamical model…
Ring diagram analysis is a standard local helioseismic technique. Data from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) are routinely used for Ring-diagram analysis, and fits to the power spectra as…
The so-called great dimming event of alpha Ori in late 2019 and early 2020 sparked our interest in the behaviour of chromospheric activity during this period. To study the timeline of chromospheric activity, we derive a S_MWO time series of…