SCIDAR measurements at Pic du Midi

Abstract

We present SCIDAR measurements made at the Pic du Midi Observatory with PISCO. A series of vertical profiles of the refractive-index structure constant $C_{\rm N}^2(h)$ was obtained with the observations of the binary stars γ Del and γ Ari, with 30 second time sampling. In the free atmosphere, the turbulence was dominated by the contribution of a few well-separated atmospheric layers at altitudes in the range 8-20 km, with significant changes within a few minutes. We describe a new method based on the CLEAN algorithm applied on the 2-D covariance function of the irradiance fluctuations in the pupil plane and compare it with the widely-used Maximum Entropy Method applied on a slice of this 2-D function. Our method is much less sensitive to the noise. Vertical profiles of the wind velocity and direction were obtained with an automatic procedure working on the mean cross-correlation function of consecutive frames. Furthermore, we validate a model for the SCIDAR detectivity threshold in terms of distance to the turbulent layers.