INSTRUMENT DESCRIPTION AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A HIGH-ORDER ADAPTIVE OPTICS SYSTEM FOR THE 1 m NEW VACUUM SOLAR TELESCOPE AT FUXIAN SOLAR OBSERVATORY

Abstract

ABSTRACT A high-order solar adaptive optics (AO) system including a fine tracking loop and a high-order wavefront correction loop has been installed at the 1 m New Vacuum Solar Telescope of the Fuxian Solar Observatory, in routine operation since 2016. The high-order wavefront correction loop consists of a deformable mirror with 151 actuators, a correlating Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor with 102 subapertures of which the Absolute Difference Square Algorithm is used to extract the gradients, and a custom-built real-time controller based on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and multi-core Digital Signal Processor (DSP). The frame rate of the wavefront sensor is up to 3500 Hz and this is, to our knowledge, the fastest solar AO system. This AO system can work with a Fried parameter r 0, at the 500 nm wavelength, of larger than 3 cm. The first 65 modes of the Zernike aberrations can be efficiently corrected and the Strehl ratio of the corrected TiO image for the solar pore is superior to 0.75 with the Fried parameter r 0 larger than 10 cm. In this paper, the design of the system is described, and high-resolution solar observational images are presented. Furthermore, the performances of the AO system are evaluated according to the data recorded by the real-time controller.