MANU-CHAO: a laboratory ground-layer adaptive optics experiment

We present a laboratory setup of a Ground-Layer Adaptive Optics system. This system is a scaled-down version of the MCAO system of MAD (a MCAO system for the VLT) / LINC-NIRVANA (a Fizeau Imager for the LBT) and measures the wavefront aberrations with 4 pyramids in a layer-oriented fashion with optical co-addition. The laboratory setup contains besides the wavefront-sensing unit a telescope-simulator, a dynamic turbulence generator and a Deformable Mirror for the wavefront correction. We describe the overall system and its single components, open- and closed-loop measurements of the characteristics of a system working in GLAO mode and first results when using a Kalman filter for the control of the wavefront reconstruction process.

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