The MPIA Optical Turbulence Simulator TurbuLenZ Homepage

In order to understand the influence of atmospheric turbulence on astronomical imaging, both observations and simulations are important. Simulations can provide full control of atmospheric parameters and are therefore quite useful for designing and optimizing adaptive optics systems.

MPIA scientist Robert Weiß is currently developing a software package calledTurbuLenZ that models the most important atmospheric parameters. Based on a C program developed by Thomas Berkefeld, Andreas Glindemann, and Richard Lane, a new version written in IDL is now available. Version 1.0 of the IDL software package TurbuLenZ is still compatible to the original C version but has some "bugs" removed. TurbuLenZ runs by a factor of 2 faster than its "C" precursor. It requires IDL Version 5.4 or above, and has been tested under Linux and MacOS.

TurbuLenZ can model multiple turbulent layers characterized through their height, Fried parameter, windspeed, winddirection, and outer scale of turbulence. Scintillation effects are modeled through Fresnel diffraction. TurbuLenZ allows more than 1 telescope and more than 1 point source as input parameter.

The main output of TurbuLenZ are phase screens, aperture intensities, and focal plane images.

Phasescreen

Example 1: Phasescreen generated by TurbuLenZ.

TurbuLenZ input parameter file used to generate the phasescreen in example 1.

TurbuLenZ IDL sources in compressed tar format.

TurbuLenZ Release Notes.