The Strehl ratio is a good measure of the performance of an
AO system. It is defined as the ratio between the peak intensity of an image
divided by the peak intensity of a diffraction-limited image with the same
total flux.
The Strehl meter is currently located in the directory
/home/nirc2eng/idl
To run it without starting an IDL session, type
> start_nirc2_strehl_vm
or you may start it in IDL using the command
> start_nirc2_strehl
The following widget should appear:
The first step is to enter the path where the data is
located. Then the starting image number should be entered. For example, for image
“n0250.fits”, enter 250. Then enter the number of consecutive images to be
analyzed. This number should be greater than or equal to one. The Strehl ratio
will be calculated from each image separately.
If there are any background files, enter the first image
number and the number of such images. It is highly recommended that a background be provided to obtain accurate Strehls. If a background image is not provided, the program will estimate the background from a circular annulus of sky in the vicinity of the star.
If autofind is set to “ON” then the program will then
automatically locate the star. If it is set to “OFF”, the user will be prompted
to select the star. The output of the program is a Strehl estimate and the
corresponding residual wave-front error obtained using the Maréchal
approximation.
Finally, the photometry radius may be set or left at its
default value of 1.0”. This is the circular aperture used to calculate the
photometry of the star.
The Strehl widget can also be used with SHARC data as follows:
IDL>path='/net/kalalau/...'
IDL>prefix='27jul'
IDL>strehl_widget,path=path,prefix=prefix,/sharc
How the Strehl meter works
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There are three major difficulties in calculating Strehls:
- The
total flux needs to be found. This is especially difficult when the pixel
size is small and there are a lot of pixels to sum the intensity over. The
amount of noise in each measurement may be small, but the total noise is
significant. As a consequence, the area over which the photometry is
estimated is limited (in the case of this routine, to one arcsecond
radius), thereby overestimating the Strehl. Large radii give less biased
estimates, but the estimates are very noisy (less precise).
- The
peak intensity needs to be found using pixelated, not sampled, data. Only
the intensity averaged over a pixel is known. There is a loss of
information, which is especially significant when the image has a low
Strehl.
- The diffraction-limited
PSF needs to be determined. This is relatively easy for monochromatic
PSFs, but for wideband filters, the PSF depends not only on the spectral
response of the filter but also on the spectrum of the source.
The following describes the operation of the Strehl meter.
The data in the neighborhood of the center of the image is
extracted. The total flux is calculated over a circular aperture with a radius
of 1”.
The image intensity is subsequently over sampled by a factor
of 8 using FFT interpolation. Then the maximum of the value of this over
sampled data is found. The maximum value is then divided by the total intensity
over the circular aperture. The diffraction-limited image is found by modeling
the Keck telescope with the 36 segments and the central obscuration. More
detailed modeling of the aperture, such as including the spiders or the gap
between adjacent segments, has not been done. Using discrete Fourier
transforms, the perfect PSF is calculated on a four times over sampled grid and
then rebinned to the right sampling. In this way, sampling vs. binning issues
are minimized.
Running the diffraction-limited image through the Strehl meter and setting the
Strehl
to be unity yields the normalization factor needed to define the Strehl.
Accuracy of the Strehl meter
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The code is completely insensitive to sub pixel shifts for
Nyquist sampled data (this is why the Strehl meter was written in the first
place). It works extremely well for
high Strehls when Nyquist sampled, as has been shown in the CfAO Strehl
competition (http://cfao.ucolick.org/Strehl/Makidon/Results).
The meter underestimates the Strehls when the Strehl ratios are less than 0.2.
A solution to this problem will be sought. The Strehl meter has been
implemented for the medium and wide cameras but has not been extensively
tested. The accuracy of the algorithm will suffer when the pixel scale
increases.
References: A paper on measuring Strehl, titled “Is that
really your Strehl ratio?”, appears in the Proceedings of the SPIE 5490, 504-515 (2004).
Obtaining the Strehl meter
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All the required files are found in the directory
/home/nirc2eng/idl/nirc2_strehl/, or can be downloaded directly here.
All the IDL *.pro files, tarred and gzipped.
The compiled IDL code as an IDL sav file.
To run these files, start an IDL session and
then type:
> strehl_widget
If you don’t have IDL, you can download and install free of
charge the IDL6 virtual machine from the RSI website.
Then you can run the strehl_widget.sav file:
e.g. in Unix, type idl –vm=`strehl_widget.sav’
Strehl meter for arbitrary telescopes/cameras
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You can also obtain a Strehl meter to be used with any
telescope and science camera here.
To use it, do the following:
Create an image of the pupil of the telescope.
Alternatively, enter the Keck pupil filename: ‘keckpupil.fits’.
Set the parameters: the pixel scale of the pupil (in this
case, 0.07 m), the plate scale of the camera (9.94 mas), and the wavelength
(1580 nm).
Click on “Calculate perfect PSF”. This will take on the
order of a minute to a few minutes, depending on the performance of the computer in use. You do not need to recalculate the perfect PSF again unless you change the pupil, plate scale or wavelength. A new image will be created with the
perfect PSF. Next enter the image whose Strehl you want to find. If the image
is not background subtracted, set “estimate background” to ON. If there is more
than one star in the field, set \223autofind!\224 to OFF. Then click “GO!”.
For more information, please contact
.
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