Year: 2026
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: Mechanical vibrations are a significant source of residual wavefront error (WFE) in adaptive optics (AO) systems, limiting the performance of high-contrast imaging instruments. We present the design and on-sky deployment of a low-cost, modular accelerometer telemetry system for the MagAO-X extreme AO instrument on the 6.5m Clay Magellan Telescope, consisting of piezoelectric accelerometers and a Raspberry Pi-based acquisition system that streams synchronized data to the real-time control computer with microsecond-level timing stability. The system is used to identify dominant telescope vibration sources and quantify their coupling to AO telemetry, revealing that several narrow-band modes originate from subsystems including the primary mirror glycol pump, secondary mirror actuation system, and telescope autofocus system. Coherence analysis between accelerometer and wavefront sensor (WFS) measurements indicates that approximately one-third of the residual tip and tilt WFE is correlated with structural vibrations. The synchronized telemetry is applied to predictive control algo rithms, where the empirical orthogonal functions predictor achieves offline variance reductions of 23% in tip and 37% in tilt. Simulations indicate that combining accelerometer feedforward control with WFS predictive control can provide order-of-magnitude suppression at vibration dominated frequencies. These results demonstrate that low-cost accelerometer telemetry provides a practical approach for vibration identification and predictive control in current and future AO systems.
DOI: 10.1117/12.3104322
Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W7202269577
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