Analysis of perspective elongation for sodium laser guide star

Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optical systems become an established technique for telescope facilities with large apertures. At these aperture diameters, such as 8m class telescope facilities, the finite distance and vertical extend of an artificial excited guide star result in perspective elongation, which produces errors in wave-front reconstruction and could influence the performance of adaptive optical systems seriously. In this paper, we shall briefly introduce and explain the relevant effect of the perspective elongation, and show some results of theoretical simulation and experiment. First of all, we analyzed how the perspective elongation of sodium LGS changes, and gave the results of simulation which indicated the r elation between the perspective elongation and some related parameters. The aberration caused by the elongation was analyzed, and the possibility of aberration correction was discussed. Based on the results of the theoretical simulation, we designed an experiment to observe the perspective elongation. A transmitting and receiving system has been set up. The system consisted of a 300mJ sodium LGS laser, a telescope with an aperture diameter of 450mm, a beam expander with an aperture diameter of 200mm, a LGS detecting device, etc. Based on the pulsed laser and the mobile LGS projector, we operated the experiment at different distance between the telescope and the laser projector. A series of elongated images, corresponding the distance from 5m to 30m, was obtained. The analytic results of the image data agreed with the theoretical simulation. Based on the experimental data, we deduced the aberration of wave-front at 30m separation. According to theoretical simulation of the perspective elongation, the effects including the aberration of wave-front could be achieved, which had been partially verified in the experiment. We suggest that one could improve the reconstruction accuracy in sodium or Rayleigh LGS adaptive optical system by eliminating the influence of the perspective elongation in advance.