Turbulence profiling for adaptive optics tomographic reconstructors

To approach optimal performance advanced Adaptive Optics (AO) systems deployed on ground-based telescopes must have accurate knowledge of atmospheric turbulence as a function of altitude. Stereo-SCIDAR is a high-resolution stereoscopic instrument dedicated to this measure. Here, its profiles are directly compared to internal AO telemetry atmospheric profiling techniques for CANARY (Vidal et al. 2014¹), a Multi-Object AO (MOAO) pathfinder on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), La Palma. In total twenty datasets are analysed across July and October of 2014. Levenberg-Marquardt fitting algorithms dubbed Direct Fitting and Learn 2 Step (L2S; Martin 2014²) are used in the recovery of profile information via covariance matrices-respectively attaining average Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients with stereo-SCIDAR of 0.2 and 0.74. By excluding the measure of covariance between orthogonal Wavefront Sensor (WFS) slopes these results have revised values of 0.65 and 0.2. A data analysis technique that combines L2S and SLODAR is subsequently introduced that achieves a correlation coefficient of 0.76.