Point Spread Function for Ground Layer Adaptive Optics

TL;DR

This paper derives an analytic model for the point spread function of ground-layer adaptive optics systems, enabling better prediction of their performance over wide fields for astronomical observations.

Contribution

It introduces a new analytic formulation for the GLAO PSF and a methodology to assess sensitivity improvements in wide-field astronomical instruments.

Findings

Derived an explicit formula for GLAO PSF.

Provided a method to estimate sensitivity gains.

Facilitated performance prediction for wide-field AO systems.

Abstract

A ground-layer adaptive optics system (GLAO) uses a single adaptive mirror to partially correct the wavefront for atmospheric and telescope aberrations over a wide field of view. Instead of reaching diffraction limit on a narrow field, the idea is to provide partial improvement of the PSF over a wide field appropriate for multi-object spectrographs or wide field imagers. We derive an analytic formulation for the GLAO corrected PSF and then apply that in developing a methodology for calculating sensitivity improvement for astronomical instruments.