Image quality and high contrast improvements on VLT/NACO
Abstract
NACO is the famous and versatile diffraction limited NIR imager and spectrograph at the VLT with which ESO celebrated 10 years of Adaptive Optics. Since two years a substantial effort has been put in understanding and fixing issues that directly affect the image quality and the high contrast performances of the instrument. Experiments to compensate the non-common-path aberrations and recover the highest possible Strehl ratios have been carried out successfully and a plan is hereafter described to perform such measurements regularly. The drift associated to pupil tracking since 2007 was fixed in october 2011. NACO is therefore even more suited for high contrast imaging and can be used with coronagraphic masks in the image plane. Some contrast measurements are shown and discussed. The work accomplished on NACO will serve as reference for the next generation instruments on the VLT, especially the ones working at the diffraction limit and making use of angular differential imaging (i.e. SPHERE, VISIR, and possibly ERIS).
Additional Information
© 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). September 13, 2012. Julien Girard would like to acknowledge the whole NACO IOT in particular Lowell Tacconi-Garman who provided very useful feedback on the elaboration of this paper. Finally he thanks ESO Paranal management, Engineering and IOT Coordinator Alain Smette for their valuable support. We are also thankful to Markus Hartung who shared his experience with us, François Rigaut and Damien Gratadour who worked on Yorick/OPRA with Benoit Neichel.Attached Files
Published - 396473.pdf
Submitted - 1210.3090v1.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 57788
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20150526-073807198
- Created
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2015-05-26Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Series Name
- Proceedings of SPIE
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 8447