Sky coverage for Layer Oriented MCAO: a detailed analytical and numerical study

TL;DR

This paper investigates the sky coverage capabilities of Layer Oriented Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) systems using analytical and numerical methods to optimize performance and expand the corrected sky area.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis combining numerical simulations and analytical models to evaluate and optimize sky coverage in Layer Oriented MCAO systems.

Findings

Enhanced sky coverage estimates for Layer Oriented MCAO

Optimization procedures improve system performance in specific conditions

Simulation results inform design choices for wider sky correction

Abstract

One of the key-points for the future developments of the multiconjugate adaptive optics for the astronomy is the availability of the correction for a large fraction of the sky. The sky coverage represents one of the limits of the existing single reference adaptive optics system. Multiconjugate adaptive optics allows to overcome the limitations due to the small corrected field of view and the Layer Oriented approach, in particular by its Multiple Field of View version, increases the number of possible references using also very faint stars to guide the adaptive systems. In this paper we study the sky coverage problem in the Layer Oriented case, using both numerical and analytical approaches. Taking into account a star catalogue and a star luminosity distribution function we run a lot of numerical simulation sequences using the Layer Oriented Simulation Tool (LOST). Moreover we perform for several cases a detailed optimization procedure and a relative full simulation in order to achieve better performance for the considered system in those particular conditions. In this way we can retrieve a distribution of numerically simulated cases that allows computing the sky coverage with respect to a performance parameter as the Strehl Ratio and to the scientific field size.