Authors

F. Quirós-Pacheco, E. Pinna, S. Esposito, A. Riccardi, S. Rabien (*)

Affiliations

INAF - Arcetri (*) MPE - Garching

Abstract

Since the introduction of the pyramid wavefront sensor in the mid 90s, various authors have shown both theoretically and with the aid of simulations that pyramid sensors can achieve a better performance than traditional Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors. Recently the First-Light AO system (FLAO) at the Large Binocular Telescope has demonstrated excellent on sky performance achieved with a pyramid based system. Motivated by these results, we will present in this paper a first heuristic analysis scaling up the FLAO performance to the case of an Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). We support our arguments with preliminary numerical simulations for the case of the European ELT using the M4 adaptive corrector and a properly matched pyramid sensor. Such a system could be used as a first-light natural guide-star AO system for the European ELT offering the advantages of a demonstrated AO system with practically off-the-shelf technology.