MagAO: Status and on-sky performance of the Magellan adaptive optics system

Abstract

MagAO is the new adaptive optics system with visible-light and infrared science cameras, located on the 6.5-m Magellan "Clay" telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. The instrument locks on natural guide stars (NGS) from 0 th to 16 th R-band magnitude, measures turbulence with a modulating pyramid wavefront sensor binnable from 28x28 to 7x7 subapertures, and uses a 585-actuator adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) to provide flat wavefronts to the two science cameras. MagAO is a mutated clone of the similar AO systems at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) at Mt. Graham, Arizona. The high-level AO loop controls up to 378 modes and operates at frame rates up to 1000 Hz. The instrument has two science cameras: VisAO operating from 0.5-1 µm and Clio2 operating from 1-5 µm. MagAO was installed in 2012 and successfully completed two commissioning runs in 2012-2013. In April 2014 we had our first science run that was open to the general Magellan community. Observers from Arizona, Carnegie, Australia, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, and Chile took observations in collaboration with the MagAO instrument team. Here we describe the MagAO instrument, describe our on-sky performance, and report our status as of summer 2014.

Scalable platform for adaptive optics real-time control, part 1: concept, architecture, and validation

“…The landscape of AO, after a long period of evolution, is now prime for consolidation and standardization. Most of the deployed modern AO systems use Shack-Hartmann (SH) wavefront sensors [11][12][13][14][15][16] (WFS) while a few use pyramid WFS 17 and curvature sensors. 18,19 The wavefront sensing is followed by the computation of a correction vector through AO reconstruction.…”

Recovering pyramid WS gain in non-common path aberration correction mode via deformable lens

“…It is about 20 years since Pyramid Wavefront Sensor (PWS) was firstly proposed [1] and then demonstrated its potentiality on sky [2,3] at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands. Nowadays, PWS are utilized in several observatories [4,5,6] all over the world and have been selected as baseline in many incoming instrumentations [7] .…”

High-contrast imaging in the cloud with klipReduce and Findr

“…The primary purpose of the MagAO system is to enable direct imaging of exoplanets. MagAO has two science cameras: the VisAO camera working in the visible (0.6-1.1 um imaging) [6][7][8]2 and the Clio2 camera working in the NIR (1-5.3 um) 9,10 . Whereas all NIR light is sent to the Clio2 camera, a selectable beamsplitter divides the visible light between the VisAO camera and a pyramid wavefront sensor (PWFS) for turbulence detection.…”