Adaptive optics system for the new Swedish solar telescope

Goran B. Scharmer; Peter M. Dettori; Mats G Lofdahl; Mark Shand

doi:10.1117/12.460387

11 February 2003 Adaptive optics system for the new Swedish solar telescope

Goran B. Scharmer, Peter M. Dettori, Mats G Lofdahl, Mark Shand

Proceedings Volume 4853, Innovative Telescopes and Instrumentation for Solar Astrophysics; (2003) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.460387
Event: Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, 2002, Waikoloa, Hawai'i, United States

Abstract

The 1-meter Swedish solar telescope is a new solar telescope that was put in operation on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands at the end of May 2002. The goal of this telescope is to reach its diffraction limited resolution of 0.1 arcsec in blue light. This has already been achieved by use of a low-order adaptive optics (AO)system. This paper describes the AO system initially developed for the former 50-cm Swedish Vacuum Solar Telescope (SVST) and further improved for the new telescope. Both systems use a combination of bimorph modal mirrors and Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors. Unique to these systems are that they rely on a single workstation or a PC to do all the computations required to extract and pre-process the images, measure their positions using cross correlation techniques and for controlling the deformable mirror. This is in the present system possible by using the PERR instruction available on Compaq's Alpha architecture and in the new system using the PSADDBW instruction, available on Pentium 4 and Athlon processors. We describe both these systems with an emphasis on the performance, the ease of support and upgrades of performance. We also describe the optimization of the electrode geometry for the new 37-electrode bimorph mirror, supplied by AOPTIX Technologies, Inc., for controlling Karhunen--Loeve modes. Expected performance, based on closed-loop simulations, is discussed.

Citation Download Citation

Goran B. Scharmer, Peter M. Dettori, Mats G Lofdahl, and Mark Shand "Adaptive optics system for the new Swedish solar telescope", Proc. SPIE 4853, Innovative Telescopes and Instrumentation for Solar Astrophysics, (11 February 2003); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.460387

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