Published July 2, 2026 | Version v1

NirvanaVIS, final design and path toward sky of the visible GLAO-assisted speckle holography upgrade of LINC-NIRVANA

Description

NirvanaVIS1 seeks to exploit the wide-field ground-layer correction of LINC-NIRVANA2 (LN), the high angular resolution, near-infrared imager installed on the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). The GLAO

configuration has been proven on-sky and is based on pyramid wavefront sensors, allowing the use of up to 12 natural guide stars in an annular 2.8-6 arcmin diameter FoV. This can improve the FWHM of the PSF

within a 2 arcmin diameter FoV by up to a factor three. This mode uses the 672 actuators LBT Adaptive Secondary Mirror. NirvanaVIS will retrieve images with very uniform PSF across the field, pushing LN

sensitivity into the visible band, specifically the wavelength range 600-1000 nm.

If approved for installation, NirvanaVIS will be implemented on a single arm of the LN bench, taking advantage of most of its existing hardware. It will employ speckle holography, in which images are reconstructed

from several short exposure frames to achieve near-diffraction-limited imagery over a 52x52 arcsec FoV, with a pixel-scale of 6.5 mas/pixel. At the wavelength of Hα, this corresponds to a factor of three improvement

over HST and a factor two over JWST, enabling diverse scientific programs.

The project's consolidated optomechanical design includes an 8K fast-frame CMOS, which presents a great opportunity but also technical challenges in data management and data reduction. Preliminary results

form its characterization are presented, together with the final design of the system and the work carried out in the past year with the goal to have NirvanaVIS operational on sky in 2027.

Files

Poster_LNVIS_Bergomi_AO4ELT8_2025_final - Remon Sjoerd Van Gaalen.pdf

Files (7.3 MB)