# The Performance of the Robo-AO Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics System at the Kitt Peak 2.1-m Telescope

## TL;DR

This paper evaluates the imaging performance of Robo-AO, an autonomous laser guide star adaptive optics system at Kitt Peak, highlighting its operational capabilities, image quality, and data processing pipeline over eighteen months.

## Contribution

It presents the first detailed performance analysis of Robo-AO at Kitt Peak, demonstrating its effectiveness and automation in adaptive optics imaging.

## Key findings

- Average Strehl ratio of 4% in i' band and 29% in J band
- Contrast ratios of five and seven magnitudes at 0.5'' and 1.0'' offsets
- Automated data processing pipeline for nightly data analysis

## Abstract

Robo-AO is an autonomous laser guide star adaptive optics system recently commissioned at the Kitt Peak 2.1-m telescope. Now operating every clear night, Robo-AO at the 2.1-m telescope is the first dedicated adaptive optics observatory. This paper presents the imaging performance of the adaptive optics system in its first eighteen months of operations. For a median seeing value of $1.31^{\prime\prime}$, the average Strehl ratio is 4\% in the $i^\prime$ band and 29\% in the J band. After post-processing, the contrast ratio under sub-arcsecond seeing for a $2\leq i^{\prime} \leq 16$ primary star is five and seven magnitudes at radial offsets of $0.5^{\prime\prime}$ and $1.0^{\prime\prime}$, respectively. The data processing and archiving pipelines run automatically at the end of each night. The first stage of the processing pipeline shifts and adds the data using techniques alternately optimized for stars with high and low SNRs. The second "high contrast" stage of the pipeline is eponymously well suited to finding faint stellar companions.