The statistics of atmospheric turbulence at Maunakea measured by RAVEN

Abstract

Prior statistical knowledge of the turbulence such as turbulence strength, layer altitudes and the outer scale is essential for atmospheric tomography in adaptive-optics (AO). These atmospheric parameters can be estimated from measurements of multiple Shack-Hartmann wave-front sensors (SH-WFSs) by the SLOpe Detection And Ranging (SLODAR). In this paper, we present the statistics of the vertical CN^2 and the outer scale L_0 at Maunakea in Hawaii estimated from 60 hours telemetry data in total from multiple SH-WFSs of RAVEN, which is an on-sky multi-object AO demonstrator tested on the Subaru telescope. The mean seeing during the RAVEN on-sky observations is 0.475 arcsec, and 55% turbulence is below 1.5 km. The vertical profile of CN^2 from the RAVEN SLODAR is consistent with the profiles from CFHT DIMM and MASS, and TMT site characterization.

Files

Additional details