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arXiv · 1901.02187

Measurements of atmospheric turbulence parameters at Vainu Bappu Observatory using short-exposure CCD images

Sreekanth Reddy V·Ravinder Kumar Banyal·Sridharan R·Aishwarya Selvaraj
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Abstract

We report the atmospheric turbulence parameters namely, atmospheric seeing, the tilt-anisoplanatic angle ($\theta_0$) and the coherence time ($\tau_0$), measured under various sky conditions, at Vainu Bappu Observatory in Kavalur. Bursts of short exposure images of selected stars were recorded with a high-speed, frame-transfer CCD mounted on the Cassegrain focus of a newly commissioned 1.3 m telescope. The estimated median seeing is $ \approx 1.85^{\prime\prime} $ at wavelength of $\sim 600$ nm, the image motion correlation between different pairs of stars is $\sim 44\%$ for $\theta_0 \approx 36^{\prime\prime}$ and mean $\tau_0$ is $\approx 2.4$ ms. This work was motivated by the design considerations and expected the performance of an adaptive optics system that is currently being planned for the telescope.

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Sreekanth Reddy V, Ravinder Kumar Banyal, Sridharan R, Aishwarya Selvaraj. 2019-01-08. Measurements of atmospheric turbulence parameters at Vainu Bappu Observatory using short-exposure CCD images. https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.02187

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