Context.A new challenging adaptive optics (AO) system, called multi-object adaptive optics (MOAO), has been successfully demonstrated on-sky for the first time at the 4.2 m William Herschel Telescope, Canary Islands, Spain, at the end of September 2010. Aims. This system, called CANARY, is aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of MOAO in preparation of a future multi-object near infra-red (IR) integral field unit spectrograph to equip extremely large telescopes for analysing the morphology and dynamics of high-z galaxies.
The Durham adaptive optics (AO) real-time controller was initially a proof of concept design for a generic AO control system. It has since been developed into a modern and powerful central-processing-unit-based real-time control system, capable of using hardware acceleration (including field programmable gate arrays and graphical processing units), based primarily around commercial off-the-shelf hardware. It is powerful enough to be used as the real-time controller for all currently planned 8 m class telescope AO systems. Here we give details of this controller and the concepts behind it, and report on performance, including latency and jitter, which is less than 10 μs for small AO systems.
Recent advances in adaptive optics (AO) have led to the implementation of wide field-of-view AO systems. A number of wide-field AO systems are also planned for the forthcoming Extremely Large Telescopes. Such systems have multiple wavefront sensors of different types, and usually multiple deformable mirrors (DMs).Here, we report on our experience integrating cameras and DMs with the real-time control systems of two wide-field AO systems. These are CANARY, which has been operating on-sky since 2010, and DRAGON, which is a laboratory adaptive optics realtime demonstrator instrument. We detail the issues and difficulties that arose, along with the solutions we developed. We also provide recommendations for consideration when developing future wide-field AO systems.
ESO is starting a number of new projects collectively called Second Generation VLT instrumentation. Several of them will use Adaptive Optics (AO). In comparison with today's ESO AO systems, the 2nd Generation VLT AO systems will be much bigger (in terms of degrees of freedom) and faster (in terms of loop frequency). Consequently the Real-Time Computer controlling these AO systems will be significantly bigger and more challenging to build compared with today's AO systems in operation. To support the new requirements ESO started the development of a common flexible platform called SPARTA for Standard Platform for Adaptive optics Real Time Applications. The guidelines along which SPARTA is developed recognize the importance of industry standards over custom development to lower the development costs, ease the maintenance and make the system upgradeable thus delivering the performance required. SPARTA is based on a hybrid architecture that comprises all the major computing architectures available today: the high computational throughput is achieved through the combination of FPGA and DSP usage, where DSP are used as fast coprocessors and FPGA are used as front and as communication infrastructure, thus guaranteeing also the low latency. The flexibility is spread between the usage of both high-end CPUs and again the DSPs. All three technologies are organized in a parallel system interconnected by fast serial fabrics based on standard protocols. External input / output interfaces are also based on industry standard protocols, thus enabling the usage of commercially available tools for development and testing.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.