Friday, July 10, 2009

Interferometer vs Wavefront Camera

We returned from Cape Town yesterday to find a very smart new workbench in the clean room. This is actually turning into quite a classy place...

In fact - now's a good time to reflect on what this room looked like about 12 weeks ago & compare it to the current scene...

Keen to check that the wavefront camera & interferometer give the same results, Darragh & Francois set about comparing their measurements of a test mirror. The laser on the interferometer serves as the light source & the wavefront & interferometer cameras are easily interchanged. When using the wavefront camera, one has to block off the reference arm of the interferometer.

Once everything's appropriately aligned, the interferometer produces fringes. These are usually recorded by the camera attached to the interferometer, but here they're seen projected on the wall.

When you match up the number of fringes you see that the two instruments are indeed measuring the same thing, albeit with a subtle sign change - the 2 interferograms are vertically inverted with respect to each other.

Sutherland continues to churn out spectacular sunsets!

No comments:

Post a Comment