Signal spatial filtering for co-phasing in seeing-limited conditions

Abstract

We present the results of the co-phasing closed loop performed with a pyramid wavefront sensor for what we believe to be the first time in the presence of emulated atmospheric disturbance. The performance of the co-phasing loop is significantly improved by applying two spatial filters in the sensor signal space. The first is a zonal filter applied to the interaction matrix before the computation of the reconstructor; the second is a modal filter applied to the sensor signals before the correction command computation. The presented laboratory results demonstrate that, applying both filters, the time requested to average out the atmospheric disturbance in each loop step is reduced by 2 orders of magnitude, improving the loop stability and accuracy.