Simone Esposito, Armando Riccardi, Enrico Pinna, Alfio Puglisi, Fernando Quirós-Pacheco, Carmelo Arcidiacono, Marco Xompero, Runa Briguglio, Guido Agapito, Lorenzo Busoni, Luca Fini, Javier Argomedo, Alessandro Gherardi, Guido Brusa, Douglas Miller, Juan Carlos Guerra, Paolo Stefanini, Piero Salinari
The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) is a unique telescope featuring two co-mounted optical trains with 8.4m primary mirrors. The telescope Adaptive Optics (AO) system uses two innovative key components, namely an adaptive secondary mirror with 672 actuators and a high-order pyramid wave-front sensor. During the on-sky commissioning such a system reached performances never achieved before on large ground-based optical telescopes. Images with 40mas resolution and Strehl Ratios higher than 80% have been acquired in H band (1.6 micron). Such images showed a contrast as high as 10e-4. Based on these results, we compare the performances offered by a Natural Guide Star (NGS) system upgraded with the state-of-the-art technology and those delivered by existing Laser Guide Star (LGS) systems. The comparison, in terms of sky coverage and performances, suggests rethinking the current role ascribed to NGS and LGS in the next generation of AO systems for the 8-10 meter class telescopes and Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs).
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2761
No comments:
Post a Comment