Related papers: Upgrading the GRAVITY fringe tracker for GRAVITY+:…
The GRAVITY instrument has been commissioned on the VLTI during 2016 and is now available to the astronomical community. It is the first optical interferometer capable of observing sources as faint as magnitude 19 in K-band. This is…
The implementation of fringe tracking for optical interferometers is inevitable when optimal exploitation of the instrumental capacities is desired. Fringe tracking allows continuous fringe observation, considerably increasing the…
GRAVITY+ is the upgrade of GRAVITY and the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) with wide-separation fringe tracking, new adaptive optics, and laser guide stars on all four 8~m Unit Telescopes (UTs), for ever fainter, all-sky, high…
Scaling up interferometry to 8m collectors should smooth-out the optical piston perturbations and allow a slow fringe tracker to obtain high precision correction on faint targets. In practice, the GRAVITY fringe tracker still observes high…
Context: MATISSE, the mid-infrared spectro-imaging instrument of VLTI, was designed to deliver its advertised performance when paired with an external second generation fringe tracker. Science observation started in 2019, demonstrating…
Context. With the arrival of the next generation of ground-based imaging interferometers combining from 4 to possibly 6 telescopes simultaneously, there is also a strong need for a new generation of fringe trackers able to cophase such…
GRAVITY is a new instrument to coherently combine the light of the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope Interferometer to form a telescope with an equivalent 130 m diameter angular resolution and a collecting area of 200…
To enable optical long baseline interferometry toward faint objects, long integrations are necessary despite atmospheric turbulence. Fringe trackers are needed to stabilize the fringes and thus increase the fringe visibility and phase…
Group delay fringe tracking using spectrally-dispersed fringes is suitable for stabilising the optical path difference in ground-based astronomical optical interferometers in low light situations. We discuss the performance of group delay…
As part of the GRAVITY$^{+}$ project, the near-infrared beam combiner GRAVITY and the VLTI are currently undergoing a series of significant upgrades to further improve the performance and sky coverage. The instrumental changes will be…
The 2nd generation VLTI instrument GRAVITY is a two-field infrared interferometer operating in the K band between 1.97 and 2.43 $\mu$m with either the four 8 m or the four 1.8 m telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT). Beams collected…
Interferometric measurements of optical path length differences of stars over large baselines can deliver extremely accurate astrometric data. The interferometer GRAVITY will simultaneously measure two objects in the field of view of the…
The spectacular results provided by the second-generation VLTI instruments GRAVITY and MATISSE on active galactic nuclei (AGN) trigger and justify a strong increase in the sensitivity limit of optical interferometers. A key component of…
The limiting magnitude is a key issue for optical interferometry. Pairwise fringe trackers based on the integrated optics concepts used for example in GRAVITY seem limited to about K=10.5 with the 8m Unit Telescopes of the VLTI, and there…
We describe the fringe packet tracking system used to equalise the optical path lengths at the Infrared Optical Telescope Array (IOTA) interferometer. The measurement of closure phases requires obtaining fringes on three baselines…
With the upgrade from GRAVITY to GRAVITY$^+$ the instrument will evolve into an all-sky interferometer that can observe faint targets, such as high redshift AGN. Observing the faintest targets requires reducing the noise sources in GRAVITY…
Context: A turbulent atmosphere causes atmospheric piston variations leading to rapid changes in the optical path difference of an interferometer, which causes correlated flux losses. This leads to decreased sensitivity and accuracy in the…
The GRAVITY instrument has been revolutionary for near-infrared interferometry by pushing sensitivity and precision to previously unknown limits. With the upgrade of GRAVITY and the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) in GRAVITY+,…
Spatial scan observations using WFC3's IR channel exhibit time-dependent systematics (in the form of a ramp or hook) that have been attributed to the effects of persistence. The amplitude of these systematics is often two orders of…
The full scientific potential of the VLTI with its second generation instruments MATISSE and GRAVITY require fringe tracking up to magnitudes K>14 with the UTs and K>10 with the ATs. The GRAVITY fringe tracker (FT) will be limited to K~10.5…