PSF reconstruction validated using on-sky CANARY data in MOAO mode
Résumé
CANARY is an open-loop tomographic adaptive optics (AO) demonstrator that was designed for use at the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in La Palma. Gearing up to extensive statistical studies of high redshifted galaxies surveyed with Multi-Object Spectrographs (MOS), the demonstrator CANARY has been designed to tackle technical challenges related to open-loop Adaptive-Optics (AO) control with mixed Natural Guide Star (NGS) and Laser Guide Star (LGS) tomography. We have developed a Point Spread Function (PSF)-Reconstruction algorithm dedicated to MOAO systems using system telemetry to estimate the PSF potentially anywhere in the observed field, a prerequisite to deconvolve AO-corrected science observations in Integral Field Spectroscopy (IFS). Additionally the ability to accurately reconstruct the PSF is the materialization of the broad and fine-detailed understanding of the residual error contributors, both atmospheric and opto-mechanical. In this paper we compare the classical PSF-r approach from Véran (1) that we take as reference on-axis using the truth-sensor telemetry to one tailored to atmospheric tomography by handling the off-axis data only. We've post-processed over 450 on-sky CANARY data sets with which we observe 92% and 88% of correlation on respectively the reconstructed Strehl Ratio (SR)/Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM) compared to the sky values. The reference method achieves 95% and 92.5% exploiting directly the measurements of the residual phase from the Canary Truth Sensor (TS).