Active optics system of the VLT Survey Telescope.

This paper describes the active optics system of the VLT Survey Telescope, the 2.6-m survey telescope designed for visible wavelengths of the European Southern Observatory at Cerro Paranal, in the Atacama desert. The telescope is characterized by a wide field of view (1.42 deg diameter), leading to tighter active optics than in conventional telescopes, in particular for the alignment requirements. We discuss the effects of typical error sources on the image quality and present the specific solutions adopted for wavefront sensing and correction of the aberrations, which are based on the shaping of a monolithic primary mirror and the positioning of the secondary in five degrees of freedom.

Removing static aberrations from the active optics system of a wide-field telescope.

The wavefront sensor in active and adaptive telescopes is usually not in the optical path toward the scientific detector. It may generate additional wavefront aberrations, which have to be separated from the errors due to the telescope optics. The aberrations that are not rotationally symmetric can be disentangled from the telescope aberrations by a series of measurements taken in the center of the field, with the wavefront sensor at different orientation angles with respect to the focal plane. This method has been applied at the VLT Survey Telescope on the ESO Paranal observatory.