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

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 16x16 AO system we can reduce the scintillation noise by an order of magnitude.

arXiv comment6 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Detection of Planetary Transits Across a Sun-like Star
• Stereo-SCIDAR: Optical turbulence profiling with high sensitivity using a modified SCIDAR instrument
• Speckle Statistics in Adaptively Corrected Images
• Open-loop tomography with artificial neural networks on CANARY: on-sky results
• Atmospheric turbulence profiling using multiple laser star wavefront sensors
• Conjugate-plane photometry: Reducing scintillation in ground-based photometry
• New algorithms for adaptive optics point-spread function reconstruction
• The FALCON concept: multi-object adaptive optics and atmospheric tomography for integral field spectroscopy. Principles and performances on an 8 meter telescope
• The stellar scintillation on large and extremely large telescopes
• Adaptive pupil masking for quasi-static speckle suppression

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Atmospheric Scintillation in Astronomical Photometry
• Scintillation-limited photometry with the 20-cm NGTS telescopes at Paranal Observatory
• Atmospheric Scintillation Noise in Ground-Based Exoplanet Photometry
• Focal plane $C_n^2(h)$ profiling based on single conjugate adaptive optics compensated images
• William Herschel Telescope site characterization using the MOAO pathfinder CANARY on-sky data
• The Oxyometer: A Novel Instrument Concept for Characterizing Exoplanet Atmospheres
• Off-axis point spread function characterisation in laser-guide star adaptive optics systems
• Using chromatic covariance to correct for scintillation noise in ground-based spectrophotometry
• Time-domain deep learning filtering of structured atmospheric noise for ground-based millimeter astronomy