C-BLUE One : A family of CMOS high speed cameras for wavefront sensing

TL;DR

The paper introduces the C-BLUE One family of CMOS high-speed cameras designed for wavefront sensing in adaptive optics, with various formats and high frame rates suitable for large and small telescopes.

Contribution

It presents the development and performance evaluation of a new CMOS-based wavefront sensor camera family tailored for laser guide star adaptive optics systems.

Findings

Achieves 481 FPS with 1600x1100 resolution.

Offers versatile formats for different AO applications.

Demonstrates low noise and high quantum efficiency.

Abstract

We present the evolutions of the C-BLUE One family of cameras (formerly introduced as C-MORE), a laser guide star oriented wavefront sensor camera family. Within the Opticon WP2 european funded project, which has been set to develop LGS cameras, fast path solutions based on existing sensors had to be explored to provide working-proven cameras to ELT projects ready for the first light schedule. Result of this study, C-BLUE One is a CMOS based camera with 1600x1100 pixels (9um pitch) and 481 FPS refresh rate. It has been developed to answer most of the needs of future laser based adaptive optics systems (LGS) to be deployed on 20-40m-class telescopes as well as on smaller ones. We present the main features of the camera and measured performance in terms of noise, dark current, quantum efficiency and image quality which are the key parameters for the application. The camera has been declined also in fast smaller format (800x600x1500FPS) and large format (3200X2200x250FPS) to cover most of the AO applications.