First light of the deformable secondary mirror-based adaptive optics system on 1.8m telescope

摘要

An adaptive optics system (AOS), which consists of a 73-element piezoelectric deformable secondary mirror (DSM), a 9×9 Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor and a real time controller has been integrated on the 1.8m telescope at the Gaomeigu site of Yunnan Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Compared to the traditional AOS on Coude focus, the DSM AOS adopts much less reflections and consequently restrains the thermal noise and increases the energy transmitting to the system. Before the first on-sky test, this system has been demonstrated in the laboratory by compensating the simulated atmospheric turbulence generated by a rotating phase screen. A new multichannel-modulation calibration method which is used to measure the DSM based AOS interaction matrix is proposed. After integration on the 1.8m telescope, the closed-loop compensation of the atmospheric turbulence with the DSM based AOS is achieved, and the first light results from the on-sky experiment are reported.