Bringing SOUL on sky

• Main Authors: Pinna, Enrico, Rossi, Fabio, Puglisi, Alfio, Agapito, Guido, Bonaglia, Marco, Plantet, Cedric, Mazzoni, Tommaso, Briguglio, Runa, Carbonaro, Luca, Xompero, Marco, Grani, Paolo, Riccardi, Armando, Esposito, Simone, Hinz, Phil, Vaz, Amali, Ertel, Steve, Montoya, Oscar M, Durney, Oliver, Christou, Julian, Miller, Doug L, Taylor, Greg, Cavallaro, Alessandro, Lefebvre, Michael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 18-01-2021
• Subjects: Physics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2101.07091

AO4ELT6 proceedings 2019 The SOUL project is upgrading the 4 SCAO systems of LBT, pushing the current
guide star limits of about 2 magnitudes fainter thanks to Electron Multiplied
CCD detector. This improvement will open the NGS SCAO correction to a wider
number of scientific cases from high contrast imaging in the visible to
extra-galactic source in the NIR. The SOUL systems are today the unique case
where pyramid WFS, adaptive secondary and EMCCD are used together. This makes
SOUL a pathfinder for most of the ELT SCAO systems like the one of GMT, MICADO
and HARMONI of E-ELT, where the same key technologies will be employed. Today
we have 3 SOUL systems installed on the telescope in commissioning phase. The
4th system will be installed in a few months. We will present here the results
achieved during daytime testing and commissioning nights up to the present
date.