Two novel approaches for determining the sky position of an unstacked, segmented-mirror telescope

Abstract

Segmented-mirror telescopes such as JWST and Keck provide a particular challenge when first pointed to the sky: to access a suitably isolated star with which to align the mirror segments, one must first determine the sky location to which the telescope is pointed. Prior to stacking, the primary mirror segments each produce a separate image of the sky; the expected result is a confusing image in which the star field is convolved with the randomly pointed segments so that each star appears multiple times. To establish the initial sky pointing of JWST, we have developed a pair of novel and complementary approaches for identifying the field. The first approach uses image pairs in which a single primary mirror segment is tilted from its initial pointing by a small amount. This motion of the segment produces a corresponding motion of the stellar images from that segment, allowing us to resolve the ambiguity between the array of stellar images and the array of segment images. The second performs a pattern match within a single image to identify the repeating pattern of the segment array (i.e., the star pattern in the field of view) which can then be matched against an astrometric catalog. Both algorithms produce a resulting array of star positions from which the astrometry.net engine can identify the sky location. We describe the application of these algorithms to both simulated JWST NIRCam images and actual images acquired with MOSFIRE on Keck I, explain how we employed these approaches during the initial stage of JWST primary mirror commissioning, and speculate on future applications for mirrors with more segments.