E. Gendron, F. Vidal, M. Brangier, T. Morris, Z. Hubert, A. Basden, G. Rousset, R. Myers, F. Chemla, A. Longmore, T. Butterley, N. Dipper, C. Dunlop, D. Geng, D. Gratadour, D. Henry, P. Laporte, N. Looker, D. Perret, A. Sevin, G. Talbot, and E. Younger, “MOAO first on-sky demonstration with CANARY,” Astronomy & Astrophysics, vol. 529, pp. L2+, Mar. 2011.
Abstract:
Context. A new challenging adaptive optics (AO) system, called multi-object adaptive optics (MOAO), has been successfully demonstrated on-sky for the first time at the 4.2 m William Herschel Telescope, Canary Islands, Spain, at the end of September 2010.
Aims. This system, called CANARY, is aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of MOAO in preparation of a future multi-object near infra-red (IR) integral field unit spectrograph to equip extremely large telescopes for analysing the morphology and dynamics of high-z galaxies.
Methods. CANARY compensates for the atmospheric turbulence with a deformable mirror driven in open-loop and controlled through a tomographic reconstruction by three widely separated off-axis natural guide star (NGS) wavefront sensors, which are in open loop too. We compared the performance of conventional closed-loop AO, MOAO, and ground-layer adaptive optics (GLAO) by analysing both IR images and simultaneous wave-front measurements.
Results. In H-band, Strehl ratios of 0.20 are measured with MOAO while achieving 0.25 with closed-loop AO in fairly similar seeing conditions (r0 ≈ 15 cm at 0.5 μm). As expected, MOAO has performed at an intermediate level between GLAO and closed-loop AO.