2026/07/30 by Ben Buky, Cédric Taïssir Héritier, Fabio Rossi +7
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.IM
7 pages, 7 figures, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2026
arxiv created 2026/07/30 · arxiv updated 2026/07/31
The advent of telescopes with an integrated deformable mirror (DM) presents new challenges for adaptive optics (AO) systems. The alignment between the DM and wavefront sensor (WFS) is expected to regularly evolve during operations due to their large separation. Without tracking and correction, these mis-registrations between the DM and WFS lead to loop instability, preventing diffraction limited performance from being realised. SPRINT\citeheritier2021 provides an approach to track these mis-registrations during observations. Rotation, shift, and magnification mis-registrations can all be recovered. The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) currently lacks an operational solution for tracking these mis-registrations, while SPRINT has been selected as the baseline approach for several instruments on the forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). We report on the implementation of SPRINT into the LBT real time computer and present experimental results from both daytime and on-sky testing to validate the method.