Paper
21 July 2014 MagAO: Status and on-sky performance of the Magellan adaptive optics system
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
MagAO is the new adaptive optics system with visible-light and infrared science cameras, located on the 6.5-m Magellan “Clay” telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. The instrument locks on natural guide stars (NGS) from 0th to 16th R-band magnitude, measures turbulence with a modulating pyramid wavefront sensor binnable from 28×28 to 7×7 subapertures, and uses a 585-actuator adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) to provide at wavefronts to the two science cameras. MagAO is a mutated clone of the similar AO systems at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) at Mt. Graham, Arizona. The high-level AO loop controls up to 378 modes and operates at frame rates up to 1000 Hz. The instrument has two science cameras: VisAO operating from 0.5-1μm and Clio2 operating from 1-5 μm. MagAO was installed in 2012 and successfully completed two commissioning runs in 2012-2013. In April 2014 we had our first science run that was open to the general Magellan community. Observers from Arizona, Carnegie, Australia, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, and Chile took observations in collaboration with the MagAO instrument team. Here we describe the MagAO instrument, describe our on-sky performance, and report our status as of summer 2014.
© (2014) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Katie M. Morzinski, Laird M. Close, Jared R. Males, Derek Kopon, Phil M. Hinz, Simone Esposito, Armando Riccardi, Alfio Puglisi, Enrico Pinna, Runa Briguglio, Marco Xompero, Fernando Quirós-Pacheco, Vanessa Bailey, Katherine B. Follette, T. J. Rodigas, Ya-Lin Wu, Carmelo Arcidiacono, Javier Argomedo, Lorenzo Busoni, Tyson Hare, Alan Uomoto, and Alycia Weinberger "MagAO: Status and on-sky performance of the Magellan adaptive optics system", Proc. SPIE 9148, Adaptive Optics Systems IV, 914804 (21 July 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2057048
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Cited by 32 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Adaptive optics

Cameras

Mirrors

Stars

Telescopes

Calibration

Charge-coupled devices

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