High-Resolution Altitude Profiles of the Atmospheric Turbulence with PML at the Sutherland Observatory

TL;DR

This paper introduces the PML instrument for high-resolution atmospheric turbulence profiling using Moon limb measurements, crucial for optimizing adaptive optics in next-generation large telescopes, with results from a deployment at Sutherland Observatory.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel high-resolution turbulence profiling method using Moon limb differential measurements and reports on its successful deployment and testing at Sutherland Observatory.

Findings

High-resolution turbulence profiles obtained from Moon limb measurements.

Successful deployment and data collection at Sutherland Observatory.

Method validated with simulated data and real observations.

Abstract

With the prospect of the next generation of ground-based telescopes, the extremely large telescopes (ELTs), increasingly complex and demanding adaptive optics (AO) systems are needed. This is to compensate for image distortion caused by atmospheric turbulence and fully take advantage of mirrors with diameters of 30 to 40 m. This requires a more precise characterization of the turbulence. The PML (Profiler of Moon Limb) was developed within this context. The PML aims to provide high-resolution altitude profiles of the turbulence using differential measurements of the Moon limb position to calculate the transverse spatio-angular covariance of the Angle of Arrival fluctuations. The covariance of differential image motion for different separation angles is sensitive to the altitude distribution of the seeing. The use of the continuous Moon limb provides a large number of separation angles allowing for the high-resolution altitude of the profiles. The method is presented and tested with simulated data. Moreover a PML instrument was deployed at the Sutherland Observatory in South Africa in August 2011. We present here the results of this measurement campaign.

Figures

Full text

See pages 1-last of Catala_et_al_MNRAS2016_Revised1.pdf