Adaptive optics at the Big Bear Solar Observatory: Instrument description and first observations

摘要

In 2004 January, the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) was equipped with a high-order adaptive optics (AO) system built in collaboration with the National Solar Observatory (NSO) at Sacramento Peak. The hardware is almost identical to the AO system operated at the NSO Dunn Solar Tower (DST), incorporating a 97 actuator deformable mirror, a Shack-Hartmann wave-front sensor with 76 subapertures, and an off-the-shelf digital signal processor system. However, the BBSO optical design is quite different. It had to be adapted to the 65 cm vacuum reflector and the downstream postfocus instrumentation. In this paper, we describe the optical design, demonstrate the AO performance, and use image restoration techniques to illustrate the image quality that can be achieved with the new AO system.