2025 October Update
KAPA Laser-Tomographic Commissioning has begun! The KAPA build team has been busy working on the bench, testing during the daytime, and now beginning on-sky commissioning in August. You will hear from them in a blog post shortly.
The KAPA Science Team has kicked off monthly meetings to begin preparing for KAPA First Light and science verification. We are planning on conducting a series of observations on
- targets that have been observed before easily (e.g. R < 15.5, on-axis tip-tilt-focus guide stars),
- targets that have been observed before, but are risky (e.g. 15.5 < R < 17.5 guide stars, or bright off axis),
- targets that could not be observed before (e.g. IR-only TT stars, R>17.5 mag)
We will observe these targets in a range of conditions and a range of OSIRIS science filters to fully test KAPA’s capabilities. The commissioning and science verification data will be analyzed and the following metrics will be extracted:
- Strehl (on-axis and over field)
- FWHM (on-axis and over field)
- Astrometric Precision
- Photometric Precision
- Contrast
We will focus on imaging with OSIRIS first and then move to spectroscopy.
You will see much more activity on this blog in coming months and we hope the Keck AO community finds it valuable. Let me know if there is something specific you would like to see reported on!
Jessica Lu (UC Berkeley)