Image Quality

Non-AO Image Quality measurements:

The Image Quality statistics presented here are based on the images taken during 2005-2006 campaign (Jan 2005 through Oct 2006).

The images were obtained at the Bent Cassegrain foci of the Keck telescopes with the star-stacking cameras. The optical configuration of each of these cameras contains a field lens and a focal reducer providing good imaging performance across the field of view of 0.35 sq. arc minutes. The spectral bandwidth of the cameras is about 100 nm centered at 650 nm.

The calculated image FWHM were corrected to zenith (by sec(z)^0.6, where z is the zenith angle). All the images were taken after correction for errors in telescope collimation (focus and coma). Small stacking errors (alignment of all individual segment images to a single image) might contribute to the total image sizes shown below.

Image Quality Statistics:

There were 164 tests performed on the Keck 1 telescope and 214 tests on the Keck 2. Most of the tests were performed between 4 am and 6 am HST.
The following table shows the median image sizes (FWHM) and the percentage of tests with image sizes less then 0.7 arc seconds in 2005 and 2006.

Median FWHM
(arc second)

% with
FWHM < 0.7 arc second
Year
K1
K2
K1
K2
2005
0.548
0.589
79.0
79.0
2006
0.533
0.498
82.6
80.3
Total
0.534
0.558
80.5
79.5

The figure below shows the distribution of image quality for both telescopes.

 

Seasonal trends:

Because the image quality can be used as a measure of seeing, we also show the month-to-month distribution of the recorded data. The next two figures show a monthly average image size for both telescopes and the data points used to calculate these average values.