| Progress in Diffraction-Limited Imaging at the Multiple Mirror Telescope with Adaptive Optics (2007) | |||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||
| this paper were obtained using only the five mirrors highlighted in Fig. 1. With no aberration, the point spread function of this array appears as shown in Fig. 2, with a bright central peak containing 25% of the energy, surrounded by twelve weaker peaks. In good seeing, the short exposure images formed by the individual apertures are nearly diffraction limited, but the continuously-changing wave front slope, different for each aperture, causes rapid image motion, and the images do not remain stacked in the focal plane. In addition, piston errors cause continuous motion of the interference peaks in regions where the images do overlap. The effects of correcting tilt and piston errors separately are quite different. Removal of the slope errors stabilizes the stacking of the individual images, but the interference pattern will continue to vary rapidly as the piston errors change. In the long exposure, the effects of interference are blurred out, and the image resembles the Airy function for a single aperture. On the other hand, a b c Fig. 2 Simulations of the unaberrated point spread function of the five beam MMT. a) | |||||||||||||||
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