Status of the PALM-3000 high order adaptive optics instrument
Abstract
We report on the status of PALM-3000, the second generation adaptive optics instrument for the 5.1 meter Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory. PALM-3000 was released as a facility class instrument in October 2011, and has since been used on the Hale telescope a total of over 250 nights. In the past year, the PALM-3000 team introduced several instrument upgrades, including the release of the 32x32 pupil sampling mode which allows for correction on fainter guide stars, the upgrade of wavefront sensor relay optics, the diagnosis and repair of hardware problems, and the release of software improvements. We describe the performance of the PALM-3000 instrument as a result of these upgrades, and provide on-sky results. In the 32x32 pupil sampling mode (15.8 cm per subaperture), we have achieved K-band strehl ratios as high as 11% on a 14.4 mv star, and in the 64x64 pupil sampling mode (8.1 cm per subaperture), we have achieved K-band strehl ratios as high as 86% on stars brighter than 7th m_v.
Additional Information
© 2014 SPIE. This work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and is based on observations obtained at the Hale Telescope, Palomar Observatory, as part of a continuing collaboration between the California Institute of Technology and NASA/JPL. We thank the staff of the Palomar Observatory and the Palomar Adaptive Optics team for their continued support. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply its endorsement by the United States Government or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. We would like to thank the Palomar Observatory superintendent Dan McKenna for his generous support of PALM-3000. In particular we would like to thank the Palomar day crew members; Steve Kunsman, Greg Van Idsinga, Mike Doyle, and John Baker, for their tireless efforts installing the complex PALM-3000 instrument on the telescope (28 times so far), and then back to the lab again (28 more!). We would like to thank John Henning for his expert help with the Palomar Observatory software and hardware interfaces to PALM-3000. We would finally like to thank the excellent night crew responsible for operating the most complex instrument ever run by Palomar staff: Jean Mueller, Kajsa Peffer, and Paul Nied. Thank you all for your generous, and continuing, support. Finally we wish to extend our heartfelt appreciation and best wishes to Jean Mueller, who will be moving on to the next chapter in her life. Your patience, dedication, and expert eye has helped guide both PalAO and PALM-3000 at Palomar to the forefront of adaptive optics science.Attached Files
Published - Burruss_2014p914827.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 61105
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20151014-135334598
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Created
-
2015-10-14Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Series Name
- Proceedings of SPIE
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 9148