Wide-Field Telescope Alignment Using the Model-Based Method Combined with the Stochastic Parallel Gradient Descent Algorithm

Abstract

To acquire images with higher accuracy of wide-field telescopes, deformable mirrors with more than 100 actuators are used, making the telescope alignment more complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, the position of the obscuration caused by the secondary mirror in the experiment system is changed with the difference of fields of view, making the response matrix of the deformable mirror different in various fields of view. To solve this problem, transfer functions corresponding to different fields of view are calculated according to the wavefront edge check and boundary conditions. In this paper, a model-based method combined with the stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) algorithm is used. The experiment results show that our method can correct the aberrations with a high accuracy in both on-axis and off-axis fields, indicating that the effective actuators are well chosen corresponding to different fields of view.

Keywords

• wide field of view
• telescope alignment
• deformable mirror
• model-based method
• SPGD algorithm