CHARA/SPICA Adaptive Optics Postdoc/Eng position

The ISSP ERC-Adv grant (PI Denis Mourard), started on 1 Sep 2021 for 5 years, aims at realizing and exploiting an ambitious and homogenous survey of the angular diameters of a thousand stars. It benefits from the recently commissioned CHARA/SPICA instrument installed on the CHARA Array, Mount Wilson Observatory (USA, CA). The survey is built to address key questions about the relation between planets and stars and to offer to the broader community a unique and primary source of direct information on a representative and large sample of stars all over the HR diagram. The project consists in the optimization of the performance of the adaptive optics devices of the CHARA telescopes to reach the ultimate performance of the SPICA visible interferometric instrument. The main technical activities considered for this position are to:

• provide night-time assistance for AO. This would involve someone being onsite to work alongside the operators to optimize AO performance. This optimization is linked to alignment issues as well as parameters of the AO loops (LabAO and TelAO).
• Establish the correct strategy for computing new on-sky reconstructors, flats, and evaluating performance.
• participate in the development of an optimized version of the software displaying, for remote operations, the critical information on AO for remote observers.
• tabulate the settings (gains, exposure time, thresholds, etc) to optimize performance for different target magnitudes and seeing conditions. This information can then be used by the operators to optimize AO settings in the future.
• create software tools that can be used on the guiding devices (STST images for the infrared and SPICA FTT images for the visible) to provide concrete metrics (Strehl, encircled flux, etc) to monitor AO performance over time. The monitoring of AO performance over time should also include the seeing conditions provided by the new seeing monitor.
• developing a better way of using the IR+VIS information (STST and SPICA FTT) for complete VIS+IR guiding, using the possibility of moving the infrared fibers blindly while keeping the alignment in the visible.

The position also offers access to the unique observing capabilities of CHARA with SPICA/MIRCX/MYSTIC instruments, and it is expected that the person will contribute to one of the scientific programs of the ISSP project.