CHOUGH: spatially filtered Shack-Hartmann wave-front sensor for HOAO

The CANARY-Hosted Upgrade for High-Order Adaptive Optics (CHOUGH), is a narrow-field of view High- Order Single Conjugate on-sky AO demonstrator to be placed on the 4.2m WHT telescope. It aims to produce a Strehl ratio greater than 0.5 in the visible region of the spectrum (> 640nm). A High-Order wave-front sensor (HOWFS) is a central piece of the experiment; it is a Shack-Hartmann with a sampling of 31x31 subapertures across the pupil. A variable aperture spatial filter designed to reduce aliasing for high-spatial frequencies, located at a focal plane preceding the lenslet array. The HOWFS has a quad-cell configuration on the detector with a one-pixel guard ring and 48μm subaperture. The detector is a NuVu EMCCD camera, 24μm pixel size, operating at >500Hz. The lenslet array, collimator and relay are commercial off-the-shelf. This was technically challenging due to the small size of the pupil, 2.3mm, and the small optics involved in the design.