Authors

Alastair Basden, Richard Myers, Nigel Dipper, Eddy Younger, Tim Morris, Deli Geng, Sofia Dimoudi

Affiliations

Durham University

Abstract

The CANARY instrument is an MOAO demonstrator instrument for the E-ELT EAGLE instrument, fielded on the William Herschel Telescope. We present the CANARY real-time control system, both as used on-sky for the NGS only phase in 2010, and also as will be used on-sky in November 2011 with tomographic LGS capability and four LGSs. This system is based on the Durham AO Real-time Controller (DARC), for which we provide details of the main features. The challenges that we encountered will be presented as a learning experience, including camera synchronisation issues, and problems with a reliable telemetry on a loaded network. We will also present recent progress made in implementing a real-time control system for EAGLE in the laboratory in Durham, and the implications that this design has. By using a system comprised of a small number of high end GPU accelerators, theoretical performance is enough to perform matrix-vector based wavefront reconstruction for EAGLE, and we investigate whether this is a practical solution.