Adaptive vibration cancellation in adaptive optics: An experimental validation

Abstract

Mechanical vibrations have a deleterious effect on the performance of high accuracy astronomical instruments. In particular the future generation of astronomical instruments is designed to deliver images of unprecedent accuracy and are therefore expected to be even more sensitive to telescope vibrations. It is then necessary to implement mechanical and software counter actions to mitigate their effect and to guarantee the expected accuracy and resolution. In this paper we report on the implementation of an adaptive control algorithm for the vibration rejection in single conjugated and laser tomography adaptive optics systems. The proposed approach can be easily adapted to the two different AO control architectures delivering the expected performance. Experimental validations at the telescope are also reported.