Final two-stage MOAO on-sky demonstration with CANARY

Abstract

CANARY is an on-sky Laser Guide Star (LGS) tomographic AO demonstrator in operation at the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in La Palma. From the early demonstration of open-loop tomography on a single deformable mirror using natural guide stars in 2010, CANARY has been progressively upgraded each year to reach its final goal in July 2015. It is now a two-stage system that mimics the future E-ELT: a GLAO-driven woofer based on 4 laser guide stars delivers a ground-layer compensated field to a figure sensor locked tweeter DM, that achieves the final on-axis tomographic compensation. We present the overall system, the control strategy and an overview of its on-sky performance.