MAD on sky results in star oriented mode

摘要

The Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (MAD) built by ESO with the contribution of two external consortiais a powerful test bench for proving the feasibility of Multi-Conjugate (MCAO) and Ground Layer Adaptive Optics(GLAO) techniques both in the laboratory and on the sky. MAD is based on a two deformable mirrors correction systemand on two multi-reference wavefront sensors (Star Oriented and Layer Oriented) capable to observe simultaneouslysome pre-selected configurations of Natural Guide Stars. MAD corrects up to 2 arcmin field of view in K band. After along laboratory test phase, it has been installed at the VLT and it successfully performed on-sky demonstration runs onseveral astronomical targets for evaluating the correction performance under different atmospheric turbulence conditions.In this paper we present the results obtained on the sky in Star Oriented mode for MCAO and GLAO configurations andwe correlate them with different atmospheric turbulence parameters. Finally we compare some of the on-sky results withnumerical simulations including real turbulence profile measured at the moment of the observations.