Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes 4 – Conference Proceedings

The European Solar Telescope (EST) will be a new generation Solar telescope with the challenge of achieving a corrected field of view (FOV) of 1 arcminute with a minimum Strehl of 40% in the whole range of elevation angles of observation. For this purpose the EST will be equipped with a MCAO (Multi- conjugate Adaptive Optics) system. The proposed MCAO system for Solar telescopes combines a narrow and a wide extended Shack Hartman (SH) wavefront sensors (WFS) taking as references the spot or granulation of the sun. The number and position of deformable mirrors (DMs), the wavefront field of view (FOV), and asterism geometry have to be correctly settled as a function of the site turbulence conditions. We have performed numerical simulations using real turbulence profiles obtained at Observatorio del Teide in order to optimize the MCAO parameters for EST.