The LBT AO system on-sky results

The first LBT natural Guide Star Adaptive Optics system (FLAO#1) has been commissioned between May 2010 and June 2011. The system uses two key components namely the adaptive secondary mirror with 672 actuators and the pyramid sensor with up to 30x30 subapertures. During the on-sky commissioning the system reached very high performance for an 8m class telescope. Briefly, FWHM of 40mas and Strehl ratio higher than 90% have been measured in H band images together with contrast as high as 10 at 0.4 arcsec off axis. The paper describes the results achieved during the system commissioning in terms of SR vs. reference star magnitudes and achieved PSF contrast. Finally the paper briefly discusses the sky coverage achieved with FLAO#1 and compares the results with the sky coverage achieved by LGS AO systems.

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