Control of the unilluminated deformable mirror actuators in an altitude-conjugated adaptive optics system
Off-axis observations made with adaptive optics are severely limited by anisoplanatism errors. However, conjugating the deformable mirror to an optimal altitude can reduce these errors; it is then necessary to control, through extrapolation, actuators that are not measured by the wave-front sensor (unilluminated actuators). In this study various common extrapolation schemes are investigated, and an optimal method that achieves a significantly better performance is proposed. This extrapolation method involves a simple matrix multiplication and will be implemented in ALTAIR, the Gemini North Telescope adaptive optics system located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. With this optimal method, the relative H-band Strehl reduction due to extrapolation errors is only 5%, 16%, and 30% when the angular distance between the guide source and the science target is 20, 40 and 60 arc sec, respectively. For a site such as Mauna Kea, these errors are largely outweighed by the increase in the size of the isoplanatic field.
Veran
JP
National Research Council of Canada, Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. jean-pierre.veran@nrc.ca