IUCAA Girawali Observatory

iROBOAO

iROBOAO optical layout

IUCAA Robotic Adaptive Optics System (iRobo-AO) is Indian version of robotic autonomous laser system adaptive optics system in visible and infrared band. This will be commissioned at IUCAA Girawali Observatory, 2m telescope. This version of Robo-AO is designed specially for Altitude-azimuth telescope.

It contains:

(a) Autonomous Laser system : To produce laser guide star,
(b) Internal telescope simulator: For laboratory calibration with both option natural guide star and laser guide star focus,
(c) Wavefront Sensing Arm: For high order wavefront phase error sensing with shack-hartmann wavefront sensor in UV (355nm).
(d) Science (for science observation) arm,
(e) Tip-tilt correction arm (to correct overall atmospheric tilt),
(f) MEMS based Deformable mirror for wavefront correction, Atmospheric dispersion corrector a pair of oppositely rotating prism.

Science and Tip-tilt arms are in visible and infrared red band. When science observation is done in IR then tiptilt correction is done in visible and viceversa. iRobo-AO system will correct atmospheric turbulence effect in real time in close loop and will achieve better Strehl Ratio and spot size.

IUCAA Girawali Observatory

IUCAA Giravali Observatory (80 kms from IUCAA) has a 2-meter optical telescope with a workhorse imaging spectrometer IFOSC which has been in extensive use for past few years. This instrument has the capability for imaging in various bands (U, B, V, R, I etc with band-pass filters) and also perform spectroscopy (with grisms and echelle grisms etc) in these bands. It has a CCD with 2048X2048 pixels with 13.5µ size each. Further it can also do polarimetric and spectro-polarimetric measurements in these optical bands. This instrument is placed at the Cassegrain focus and renders a field-of-view (fov) of about 11 square arc-min in the sky.

More details are available at: http://www.iucaa.ernet.in/~itp/

The following links provide details on various back-end instruments which go with the IGO 2-meter telescope

Fabry Perot

FP layout In order to enhance the observational capabilities of 2 m telescope at IUCAA Girawali Observatory, an Imaging Fabry-Perot Spectrometer (IFPS) is currently under development.

TIP TILT

tip tilt optical layout

Tip-tilt corrector stabilize the star images by correcting wavefront phase of infrared light.