Development of an Advanced Multiple Aperture Seeing Profiler

Turbulence seeing profiles are an extremely important factor when considering an astronomical site. Since observations made with ground-based telescopes suffer from turbulence perturbations, which seriously degrade the image quality, adaptive optics are needed to correct this. However, optimal design of adaptive optics systems such as Ground-Layer Adaptive Optics (GLAO) and Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) rely on knowledge of the seeing profile at the site. The issue with this is that many of the current techniques to measure the seeing profile require a large telescope to perform. Therefore, a portable device that can measure the seeing profile at a desired site is needed. Recently, an Advanced-Multiple Aperture Seeing Profiler (A-MASP) was proposed that uses two small telescopes and multiple solar guide stars to measure the seeing profile up to 30 km. An initial proof-of-concept test was performed using the Dunn Solar Telescope (DST) at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and an aperture mask to mimic the two telescopes. Here, we report on the initial observation results of the prototype portable A-MASP device at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO). We find that using multiple solar guide stars, our A-MASP can reliably retrieve the seeing profile up to a height of 6.5 km.