First light with adaptive optics: the performance of the DKIST high-order adaptive optics

Abstract

The National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) achieved first light in late 2019. The DKIST’s design includes a wavefront correction system, which incorporates Adaptive Optics (AO) in order to feed a diffraction-limited beam to five of its first-light science instruments. The first-light DKIST AO is a single-conjugate system designed to achieve 0.3 Strehl at 500 nm observing wavelength in our expected median seeing of r0 = 7 cm. The system incorporates a 1600-actuator Deformable Mirror (DM), a fast tip-tilt (FTT) corrector, a low-latency hybrid Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) / Central Processing Unit (CPU) real-time controller, and a correlating Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor with 1457 active subapertures. We present results from the first light campaign of the DKIST, focusing on AO system performance. We compare the on-sky AO performance to the performance predicted through error-budget analysis and discuss implications for ongoing operation of DKIST and the upgrade path to DKIST multi-conjugate AO.