Bibcode
Hoegemann, Claudia K.; Delgado, Jose M.; Fuensalida, J. J.; Hernandez, Elvio; Rodriguez, Angeles; Verde, Manuel
Bibliographical reference
Optics in Atmospheric Propagation and Adaptive Systems VII. Edited by Gonglewski, John D.; Stein, Karin. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 5572, pp. 292-302 (2004).
Advertised on:
11
2004
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
In the planning stage of extremely large telescopes, site testing and
study of high performance adaptive optics systems plays very important
roles. Site testing is a very time consuming task, therefore, we have
built a fully automatic device - the CUTE SCIDAR instrument with a
user-friendly interface and real time processing. This instrument is
already in operation and now has been installed in the Jacobus Kapteyn
Telescope of Roque de los Muchachos Observatory at La Palma for
periodical turbulence profiling. A second version with an additional
phase sensor bench contains a motorized field stop, a field lens, a
collimator lens, and a Shack-Hartmann sensor. This instrument measures
the turbulence from both amplitude and phase variations of the same
distorted wave at high frequency bandwidth, with a high resolution and
dynamic range. On the one hand, this will solve the calibration problem
between different turbulence sensors. On the other hand, it allows
investigating the performance of multi-conjugated wavefront sensing
using real time information from SCIDAR data and proving validity of the
near field assumption. From preliminary Shack-Hartmann measurements we
conclude that the instrument should be flexible to change optical layout
and detection parameters according to the turbulence conditions.
Therefore, the phase sensor branch includes automatically controlled
moveable devices, and in the future, fast communication facilities
between control computers of both SCIDAR and wavefront sensing are
previewed. In this paper, we will present our objectives of building
such an instrument, give a detailed state of art design, and considerate
the preparation of first observational campaigns, that are the first
scientific tasks to do.