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

Osborn, James

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


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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.

Citation

Osborn, J. (2015). Scintillation correction for astronomical photometry on large and extremely large telescopes with tomographic atmospheric reconstruction. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 446(2), 1305-1311. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stu2175

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 16, 2014
Online Publication Date Nov 11, 2014
Publication Date Jan 11, 2015
Deposit Date Nov 24, 2014
Publicly Available Date Apr 15, 2015
Journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN 0035-8711
Electronic ISSN 1365-2966
Publisher Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 446
Issue 2
Pages 1305-1311
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stu2175
Keywords Atmospheric effects, Instrumentation: adaptive optics, Methods: observational, Techniques: photometric.

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Copyright Statement
This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. © 2014 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.





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