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Published February 2018 | public
Journal Article

On-sky Closed-loop Correction of Atmospheric Dispersion for High-contrast Coronagraphy and Astrometry

Abstract

Adaptive optic (AO) systems delivering high levels of wavefront correction are now common at observatories. One of the main limitations to image quality after wavefront correction comes from atmospheric refraction. An atmospheric dispersion compensator (ADC) is employed to correct for atmospheric refraction. The correction is applied based on a look-up table consisting of dispersion values as a function of telescope elevation angle. The look-up table-based correction of atmospheric dispersion results in imperfect compensation leading to the presence of residual dispersion in the point spread function (PSF) and is insufficient when sub-milliarcsecond precision is required. The presence of residual dispersion can limit the achievable contrast while employing high-performance coronagraphs or can compromise high-precision astrometric measurements. In this paper, we present the first on-sky closed-loop correction of atmospheric dispersion by directly using science path images. The concept behind the measurement of dispersion utilizes the chromatic scaling of focal plane speckles. An adaptive speckle grid generated with a deformable mirror (DM) that has a sufficiently large number of actuators is used to accurately measure the residual dispersion and subsequently correct it by driving the ADC. We have demonstrated with the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme AO (SCExAO) system on-sky closed-loop correction of residual dispersion to <1 mas across H-band. This work will aid in the direct detection of habitable exoplanets with upcoming extremely large telescopes (ELTs) and also provide a diagnostic tool to test the performance of instruments which require sub-milliarcsecond correction.

Additional Information

© 2018 The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Received 2017 July 8; accepted 2017 October 30; published 2018 January 15. The development of SCExAO was supported by the JSPS (Grant-in-Aid for Research 23340051, 26220704, 23103002), the Astrobiology Center (ABC) of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Japan, the Mt. Cuba Foundation and the directors contingency fund at Subaru Telescope. The authors recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have had the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. Facility: Subaru Telescope. -

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023