MagAO: Status and on-sky performance of the Magellan adaptive optics system

Abstract

MagAO is the new adaptive optics system with visible-light and infrared science cameras, located on the 6.5-m Magellan "Clay" telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. The instrument locks on natural guide stars (NGS) from 0${}^{\mathrm{th}}$ to 16${}^{\mathrm{th}}$ $R$-band magnitude, measures turbulence with a modulating pyramid wavefront sensor binnable from 28x28 to 7x7 subapertures, and uses a 585-actuator adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) to provide flat wavefronts to the two science cameras. MagAO is a mutated clone of the similar AO systems at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) at Mt. Graham, Arizona. The high-level AO loop controls up to 378 modes and operates at frame rates up to 1000 Hz. The instrument has two science cameras: VisAO operating from 0.5-1 $\mu$m and Clio2 operating from 1-5 $\mu$m. MagAO was installed in 2012 and successfully completed two commissioning runs in 2012-2013. In April 2014 we had our first science run that was open to the general Magellan community. Observers from Arizona, Carnegie, Australia, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, and Chile took observations in collaboration with the MagAO instrument team. Here we describe the MagAO instrument, describe our on-sky performance, and report our status as of summer 2014.

13 pages, 11 figures, to appear in Proc. SPIE 9148-3

References in corpus (1)

• Magellan Adaptive Optics first-light observations of the exoplanet $\beta$ Pic b. I. Direct imaging in the far-red optical with MagAO+VisAO and in the near-IR with NICI

Cited by in corpus (14)

• On-sky performance analysis of the vector Apodizing Phase Plate coronagraph on MagAO/Clio2
• The coronagraphic Modal Wavefront Sensor: a hybrid focal-plane sensor for the high-contrast imaging of circumstellar environments
• An ALMA and MagAO Study of the Substellar Companion GQ Lup B
• The Giant Accreting Protoplanet Survey (GAPlanetS) -- Results from a Six Year Campaign to Image Accreting Protoplanets
• The Multiplicity of M-Dwarfs in Young Moving Groups
• New Spatially Resolved Observations of the T Cha Transition Disk and Constraints on the Previously Claimed Substellar Companion
• Multiwavelength Observations of NaSt1 (WR 122): Equatorial Mass Loss and X-rays from an Interacting Wolf-Rayet Binary
• High-contrast observations of brown dwarf companion HR 2562 B with the vector Apodizing Phase Plate coronagraph
• The Giant Accreting Protoplanet Survey (GAPlanetS): Optimization Techniques for Robust Detections of Protoplanets
• Resolving the H-alpha-emitting Region in the Wind of Eta Carinae
• Occurrence rates of accreting companions from a new method for computing emission-line survey sensitivity: application to the H-alpha Giant Accreting Protoplanet Survey
• Fast, Nonlinear Phase Estimation with the Non-Modulated Pyramid Wavefront Sensor at Low Strehl Ratio
• Demonstration of magnetic and light-controlled actuation of a photomagnetically actuated deformable mirror for wavefront control
• MagAO observations of the binary microlens OGLE-2014-BLG-1050 prefer the higher-mass solution