Linear actuators installed!

When thinking about instrumentation for a telescope, the first thing that comes to mind is of course optics: lenses, prisms and mirrors, that carry the light collected by the primary mirror of the telescope all the way down to a camera. SCExAO obviously uses a lot of these components and with time, this blog will hopefully give you some insights into the gory details of coronagraphs.

A piece of optics is a 3D component, that requires to be kept not only in one place in space, the usual (x,y,z) coordinates, but also with the right orientation which adds another three degrees of freedom. And to add to the fun, when the instrument is taking diffraction limited images, most of these parameters must be accurate within a fraction of one wavelength, which for SCExAO is not too bad since it works in the near-infrared (lambda = 1.6 microns)... but is still a bit of a challenge!

A lot of the optical mounts are therefore on stages driven by micrometers, and some of them need to be adjusted once in a while. Where it seems important and when we can afford it, we replace the manual micrometers by computer controlled actuators. Yesterday, Frédéric finished installing some of the Zaber linear actuators that we've chosen to do the job. The picture just shows a couple of these in-situ. The bench looks cooler and cooler everyday as we keep adding new hardware! Now, someone needs to finish writing the Python code that will talk to these actuators so that we can really computer control everything in SCExAO...