Characterization of lemniscate atmospheric aberrations in Gemini Planet Imager data

TL;DR

This paper develops a semi-analytic model to understand atmospheric aberrations in AO imaging, revealing that high-altitude jet streams cause characteristic lemniscate-shaped PSF distortions in the Gemini Planet Imager data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework linking atmospheric wind patterns, especially jet streams, to specific aberration shapes in adaptive optics imaging.

Findings

Jet streams at 10-15 km altitude strongly correlate with lemniscate aberrations.

The developed metric quantifies the aberration effect in the PSF.

Errors due to servo-lag produce characteristic shape distortions aligned with wind direction.

Abstract

A semi analytic framework for simulating the effects of atmospheric seeing in Adaptive Optics systems on an 8-m telescope is developed with the intention of understanding the origin of the wind-butterfly, a characteristic two-lobed halo in the PSF of AO imaging. Simulations show that errors in the compensated phase on the aperture due to servo-lag have preferential direction orthogonal to the direction of wind propagation which, when Fourier Transformed into the image plane, appear with their characteristic lemniscate shape along the wind direction. We develop a metric to quantify the effect of this aberration with the fractional standard deviation in an annulus centered around the PSF, and use telescope pointing to correlate this effect with data from an atmospheric models, the NOAA GFS. Our results show that the jet stream at altitudes of 100-200 hPa (equivalently 10-15 km above sea level) is highly correlated (13.2$\sigma$) with the strong butterfly, while the ground wind and other layers are more or less uncorrelated.