MagAO: Status and on-sky performance of the Magellan adaptive optics system

TL;DR

MagAO is a high-performance adaptive optics system on the Magellan telescope, capable of correcting atmospheric turbulence in visible and infrared wavelengths, with successful commissioning and active scientific use since 2012.

Contribution

This paper reports the design, implementation, and on-sky performance of MagAO, a novel adaptive optics system with advanced wavefront sensing and correction capabilities.

Findings

MagAO achieves high Strehl ratios in visible and infrared wavelengths.

The system operates at up to 1000 Hz frame rate with 378 modes.

Successful commissioning and scientific observations since 2012.

Abstract

MagAO is the new adaptive optics system with visible-light and infrared science cameras, located on the 6.5-m Magellan "Clay" telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. The instrument locks on natural guide stars (NGS) from 0$^\mathrm{th}$ to 16$^\mathrm{th}$ $R$-band magnitude, measures turbulence with a modulating pyramid wavefront sensor binnable from 28x28 to 7x7 subapertures, and uses a 585-actuator adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) to provide flat wavefronts to the two science cameras. MagAO is a mutated clone of the similar AO systems at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) at Mt. Graham, Arizona. The high-level AO loop controls up to 378 modes and operates at frame rates up to 1000 Hz. The instrument has two science cameras: VisAO operating from 0.5-1 $\mu$m and Clio2 operating from 1-5 $\mu$m. MagAO was installed in 2012 and successfully completed two commissioning runs in 2012-2013. In April 2014 we had our first science run that was open to the general Magellan community. Observers from Arizona, Carnegie, Australia, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, and Chile took observations in collaboration with the MagAO instrument team. Here we describe the MagAO instrument, describe our on-sky performance, and report our status as of summer 2014.