ATACAMA WORKSHOP, June 15-17 2000


Monitoring Turbulence Height with a DIMM	ATACAMA WORKSHOP, Ithaca NY M. Sarazin, June 15-17 2000, 9/14

Monitoring Turbulence Height with a DIMM

ATACAMA WORKSHOP, Ithaca NY

M. Sarazin, June 15-17 2000, 9/14

Scintillation through DIMM apertures of 10-12cm diameter can be related to the isoplanatic angle (Loos & Hogge, Appl. Opt. 18, 15; 1979) and then to the normalized 5/3rd moment of the turbulence height (Hbar).

The atmospheric seeing (black lower curve, in arcsec) is the cumulative effect of several turbulent layers at various altitudes: monitoring the characteristic altitude of the turbulence (red upper curve, in km) is necessary for planning adaptive optics instrumentation. In this example, the bad seeing is located at low altitude while good conditions are produced by a few layers at high altitude.