The Durham adaptive optics real-time controller: Capability and ELT suitability

TL;DR

The Durham adaptive optics real-time controller is a versatile, high-performance system capable of supporting current and future Extremely Large Telescope adaptive optics systems through recent enhancements and hardware optimizations.

Contribution

This paper details recent feature additions, performance improvements, and optimization strategies for the Durham AO real-time controller, demonstrating its suitability for ELT applications.

Findings

High performance with modern hardware

Compatibility with existing AO systems

Potential for ELT adaptive optics integration

Abstract

The Durham adaptive optics real-time controller is a generic, high performance real-time control system for astronomical adaptive optics systems. It has recently had new features added as well as performance improvements, and here we give details of these, as well as ways in which optimisations can be made for specific adaptive optics systems and hardware implementations. We also present new measurements that show how this real-time control system could be used with any existing adaptive optics system, and also show that when used with modern hardware, it has high enough performance to be used with most Extremely Large Telescope adaptive optics systems.