Abstract Details

Name: Ravinder Banyal
Affiliation: Indian Institute of Astrophysics
Conference ID: ASI2020_248
Title : Design and development of a tip-tilt instrument for 1.3 telescope
Authors and Co-Authors : Ravinder K. Banyal, Sreekanth V. and Sreedhar R.
Abstract Type : Oral
Abstract Category : Instrumentation and Techniques
Abstract : A short exposure image motion in the telescope focal plane results from the angle-of-arrival fluctuations of an optical wavefront that passes through the turbulent atmosphere of the earth. The stellar image quality can be improved significantly by eliminating the low-order tip-tilt component. In this presentation, I will report the development of a tip-tilt system for our 1.3 m telescope at Vainu Bappu Observatory, Kavalur. I will discuss the details of the instrument design, laboratory calibration and on-sky performance. The instrument is designed to operate at visible wavelength band with a 1'x'1 wide field of view. A closed-loop bandwidth of ≈ 26 Hz has been achieved with on-sky tests, reducing the RMS image motion of the stars to a sub-pixel level. Further, the FWHM of the tilt-corrected images shows about 57% narrowing which increases the peak intensity nearly by three times. Our next goal is to design and build an end-to-end system for high order AO corrections.