ﻻ يوجد ملخص باللغة العربية
Over the last few years increasing consideration has been given to the study of Laser Guide Stars (LGS) for the measurement of the disturbance introduced by the atmosphere in optical and near-infrared astronomical observations from the ground. A possible method for the generation of a LGS is the excitation of the Sodium layer in the upper atmosphere at approximately 90 km of altitude. Since the Sodium layer is approximately 10 km thick, the artificial reference source looks elongated, especially when observed from the edge of a large aperture. The spot elongation strongly limits the performance of the most common wavefront sensors. The centroiding accuracy in a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, for instance, decreases proportionally to the elongation (in a photon noise dominated regime). To compensate for this effect a straightforward solution is to increase the laser power, i.e. to increase the number of detected photons per subaperture. The scope of the work presented in this paper is twofold: an analysis of the performance of the Weighted Center of Gravity algorithm for centroiding with elongated spots and the determination of the required number of photons to achieve a certain average wavefront error over the telescope aperture.
Sodium Laser Guide Stars (LGSs) are elongated sources due to the thickness and the finite distance of the sodium layer. The fluctuations of the sodium layer altitude and atom density profile induce errors on centroid measurements of elongated spots,
The new class of large telescopes, as the future ELT, are designed to work with Laser Guide Star (LGS) tuned to a resonance of atmosphere sodium atoms. This wavefront sensing technique presents complex issues for an application to big telescopes due
In typical adaptive optics applications, the atmospheric residual turbulence affects the wavefront sensor response decreasing its sensitivity. On the other hand, wavefront sensors are generally calibrated in diffraction limited condition, and, so, th
In recent years, detectors with sub-electron readout noise have been used very effectively in astronomical adaptive optics systems. Here, we compare readout noise models for the two key faint flux level detector technologies that are commonly used: E
We investigate the improvements in Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor image processing that can be realised using total variation minimisation techniques to remove noise from these images. We perform Monte-Carlo simulation to demonstrate that at certain