Thai National Telescope beam simulator testbed development status

Christophe Buisset; Apirat Prasit; Thierry Lépine; Saran Poshyachinda; A. Leckngam

doi:10.1117/12.2229573

27 July 2016 Thai National Telescope beam simulator testbed development status

Christophe Buisset, Apirat Prasit, Thierry Lépine, Saran Poshyachinda, A. Leckngam

Proceedings Volume 9906, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes VI; 99063N (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2229573
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2016, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Abstract

The Thai National Telescope (TNT) is a Ritchey-Chretien Telescope with a clear aperture ΦM1 = 2.3 m, a focal ratio f/10 and a central obstruction Obsc = 0.3. The TNT is the main instrument of the Thai National Observatory (TNO) which is located near the summit of the Doi Inthanon, situated in the Chiang Mai Province of Thailand at altitude 2,457 meters. The median seeing on this site is approximately 0.9” and is remarkably stable on most nights, rarely exceeding 2”. We decided to develop an optical setup to simulate in laboratory conditions the geometry of the TNT output beam. This, in order to carefully prepare and to improve the efficiency of the test to be performed in real conditions at the TNT focal plane level. We specified the setup to be representative of the TNT optical design, beam aperture, central obscuration, geometry of the spider, wavefront quality and PSF size under various seeing conditions. This setup comprises 2 identical Cassegrain telescopes mounted on dedicated supports with 5 degree-of-Freedom. The first application of this setup will be the preparation of the TNT optical alignment. The second application of this setup will be the development and the test of the future instruments for the TNT such as a focal reducer or a spectrograph. In this paper, we discuss the setup specifications we describe the setup optical and mechanical design and we present the performance.

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Christophe Buisset, Apirat Prasit, Thierry Lépine, Saran Poshyachinda, and A. Leckngam "Thai National Telescope beam simulator testbed development status", Proc. SPIE 9906, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes VI, 99063N (27 July 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2229573

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KEYWORDS

Telescopes

Wavefronts

Calibration

Mirrors

Optical simulations

Wavefront sensors

Beam splitters

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