New wavefront-sensing guiders for SOAR

Andrei Tokovinin; Nicole David; José Piracés; Rolando Cantarutti

doi:10.1117/12.2312082

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6 July 2018 New wavefront-sensing guiders for SOAR

Andrei Tokovinin, Nicole David, José Piracés, Rolando Cantarutti

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Proceedings Volume 10702, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VII; 107022F (2018) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2312082
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2018, Austin, Texas, United States

Abstract

The 4.1-m SOAR telescope needs fast tip-tilt guiding and active correction of focus and astigmatism to reach good image quality allowed by the excellent site seeing. A concept of the new guider with a 2×2 wavefront sensor is presented. It uses the X-Y positioning mechanism of the current guider, while the pick-off arm, camera, and detector are replaced by the new hardware. The pick-off arm has 2 positive lenses to collimate the beam, with an internal focus adjustment to compensate for focus offset in the science instrument and for the field curvature. The 4 spots are formed by a mirror with slightly tilted segments, located near the camera. The detector is an EM CCD; guiding on stars as faint as V=17 mag is possible using the correlation algorithm for centroiding; aberrations are measured on the averaged images. Results of the on-sky tests of the new guider prototype are presented.

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Andrei Tokovinin, Nicole David, José Piracés, and Rolando Cantarutti "New wavefront-sensing guiders for SOAR", Proc. SPIE 10702, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VII, 107022F (6 July 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2312082

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