ALTA Center: Advanced LBT Turbulence and Atmosphere Center Report 12/2019
Date Issued
2019
Author(s)
Description
The ALTA team wishes to thanks the LBTO Director, Christian Veillet who supported this work with constant
enthusiasm and participation. This work has been carried out thanks to the valid collaboration of the whole
LBTO staff. ALTA Center forecasts are performed in the INAF-OAA CED.
Abstract
ALTA Center is a project funded by the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory
conceived to support science operations of LBT and LBTI. The main goal is to
set-up a completely automatic system to forecast the most important atmospheric
and astroclimatic parameters (seeing, isoplanatic angle, wavefront coherence
time) relevant for the ground-based astronomical observations, particularly those
supported by Adaptive Optics. The project started on 2015 and it has been
conceived as a long term project and it is organised on a sequence of contracts of
typically five years. The plan has been defined and agreed with the LBTO Director
so to be able to supply the required informations on the atmospheric conditions
necessary for the LBTO facilities operations, particularly those supported by the
Adaptive Optics and the Interferometry.
The project has been warmly solicited by the LBTO Director, Christian Veil-
let as a piece of a more extended plan aiming to equip LBTO with a set of
tools/instrumentations necessary to provide a complete monitoring and character-
isation of the atmosphere of Mt.Graham, site of the LBT. The outputs of ALTA
Center are supposed to be injected in the LBT Science Operation system designed
to optimise the management of the LBT observations [1]. The first contract of
ALTA has been conceived to cover a five years activity in the period 2015-2019.
At present time ALTA Center is one of the very few centers existent in the
astronomical context at a worldwide scale that is able to predict all the key atmo-
spherical and astroclimatic parameters relevant for the ground-based astronomy. It
is at our knowledge the first and unique center that is able to provide forecasts at
short time scales (i.e. a few hours) with such accuracies (see Section 7).
It is important to mention that ALTA Center is in continuous evolution. A few
functionalities of ALTA could not yet been validated because of a lack of presence
of dedicated monitors in situ that are however supposed to be implemented in the
next future (for example a MASS - Multi Aperture Scintillation Sensor). This will
be included in a forthcoming contract.
Rights
open.access
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