Scintillation correction for astronomical photometry on large and extremely large telescopes with tomographic atmospheric reconstruction

Abstract

We describe a new concept to correct for scintillation noise on high-precision photometry in large and extremely large telescopes using telemetry data from adaptive optics (AO) systems. Most wide-field AO systems designed for the current era of very large telescopes and the next generation of extremely large telescopes require several guide stars to probe the turbulent atmosphere in the volume above the telescope. These data can be used to tomographically reconstruct the atmospheric turbulence profile and phase aberrations of the wavefront in order to assist wide-field AO correction. If the wavefront aberrations and altitude of the atmospheric turbulent layers are known from this tomographic model, then the effect of the scintillation can be calculated numerically and used to normalize the photometric light curve. We show through detailed Monte Carlo simulation that for an 8 m telescope with a 16 × 16 AO system we can reduce the scintillation noise by an order of magnitude.