Mercury observations with Adaptive Optics
Solar AO running at 150Hz on Mercury in daytime
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THEMIS has a long track of doing Mercury observations in daytime. It took some tuning to adjust a 1kHz AO system to less photons, longer exposure times, and a slower speed. But the hardware and the software are strictly identical, and changing the configuration takes just 2 minutes. Despite of the slower speed, the result is surprisingly good and gives excellent results in the long-exposure spectra. These data are use for sub-arcsecond mapping of the exospheric sodium emission of Mercury (sodium map emission courtesy Mangano & Leblanc).
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Mercury is scanned across the spectrograph slit using our OBJ2 scanning mirror. Scanning is performed along Mercury polar axis and acrosse its equator. Planet orientation is adjusted (if necessary), by setting an offset to the field rotator. |
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