CANARY: An On-Sky Instrument Development Test Bench Open to the Community

T. Morris*, E. Gendron, G. Rousset, D. Bonaccini Calia, L. Bardou, M. Centrone, J. Osborn, F. Chemla, T. Buey, L. Staykov, N. Bharmal, M. Townson, M. Cohen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

The CANARY AO system was developed to provide on-sky demonstration of multiple NGS/LGS tomographic AO and later to assess the impact of ELT-scale LGS perspective elongation on Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor performance. CANARY completed these initial research goals in 2016, and the database of archived on-sky open- and pseudo-open loop AO telemetry data was made available to the community in 2018. Through the H2020 OPTICON program, and with support from ESO and the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, access to CANARY has now been opened to the instrumentation community through a competitive call for proposals. CANARY is now available to use as a test bench for the on-sky development of new instrumentation concepts or validate AO performance models at the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope. The first on-sky runs in 2019 have now been completed and an additional call is planned to allocate a total of 5-10 nights of on-sky time in 2020/2021. In this poster we describe the potential CANARY configurations offered to the community (including SCAO, NGS-only tomographic AO and sodium LGS AO), how to apply for time and gain access to the existing archive of on-sky CANARY data.

Original languageEnglish
Pages1-6
Number of pages6
Publication statusPublished - 30 Oct 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event6th International Conference on Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes, AO4ELT 2019 - Quebec City, Canada
Duration: 9 Jun 201914 Jun 2019

Conference

Conference6th International Conference on Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes, AO4ELT 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityQuebec City
Period9/06/1914/06/19

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