An imaging system is constructed by atmosphere turbulence and ground-based telescope when the latter is used to observe a space object. The wavefront measurement produced by adaptive optics system can be used to estimate the point spread function (PSF) of the imaging system since it contains the wavefront aberration information of the light from the object. But the detector noise of the wavefront sensor (WFS) will inevitably bring estimation error. Based on the statistical theory, a method is presented to improve the PSF estimation accuracy by eliminating the noise error from the wavefront measurement. The numerical simulation shows that the estimation error of this method could be lower than 10%. It also indicates that the higher the signal-noise ratio (SNR) of the WFS is, the more frames of the wavefront measurements are used, and the bigger the Fried constant is, the more accurate the estimation will be. The work in this paper can be applied to performance evaluation of imaging system, deconvolution of AO images, as well as photometric analysis of space object.
The wavefront sensor is used in adaptive optics (AO) to detect the atmospheric distortion, which feeds back to the deformable mirror to compensate for this distortion. While the Shack–Hartmann sensor has been widely used, the plenoptic sensor was proposed in recent years. The two different wavefront sensing methods have different interpretations and numerical consequences, though they are both slope-based. The plenoptic sensor is compared with the Shack–Hartmann sensor in a closed-loop AO system. Simulations are performed to investigate their performances under closed-loop conditions. The plenoptic sensors both without and with modulation are discussed. The results show that the closed-loop performance of the plenoptic sensor without modulation is worse than that of the Shack–Hartmann sensor when the star for observation is brighter than magnitude 7, but better when the star is fainter. The closed-loop performance of the plenoptic sensor could be improved by modulation, except for the faint star. In summary, the limiting magnitude of the astronomical AO system may be improved by using the plenoptic sensor instead of the Shack–Hartmann sensor, and the modulation of the plenoptic sensor is more suitable for the bright star.
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