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 0th to 16th R-band magnitude, measures turbulence with a modulating pyramid wavefront sensor binnable from 28×28 to 7×7 subapertures, and uses a 585-actuator adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) to provide at 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 0.5-1μm 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.
- Publication:
-
Adaptive Optics Systems IV
- Pub Date:
- July 2014
- DOI:
- 10.1117/12.2057048
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1407.5098
- Bibcode:
- 2014SPIE.9148E..04M
- Keywords:
-
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 13 pages, 11 figures, to appear in Proc. SPIE 9148-3