AstraLux Sur is a Lucky Imaging Camera built for the New Technology Telescope NTT located at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Lucky Imaging with AstraLux Sur and AstraLux
What is Lucky Imaging? Image distortions due to atmospheric seeing are not static. The degree of image degradation varies over a wide range on timescales of seconds. Exploit this fact and:
(1) Acquire a large number of short-exposure images, typically 10.000 * 30ms (needs high-speed, high-sensitivity, low-noise detector).
(2) Measure the image quality of each single frame (needs a reference object).
(3) Select the best few percent of all images, typically 1-10%.

(4) Combine these high-quality images to get the final improved result.
Pioneering work by Craig Mackay, Bob Tubbs et al. at the Nordic Optical Telescope (LuckyCam).

MPIA AstraLux Sur team: Wolfgang Brandner, Stefan Hippler, Felix Hormuth, Markus Janson, Sebastian Daemgen, Boyke Rochau, Armin Böhm, Armin Huber, Ralf-Rainer Rohloff, Karl Wagner, Thomas Henning
AstraLux Sur camera specs; our model is DU-897D-CS0-#BV
AstraLux Sur pre-optics
and filter wheel
Filter data, QE data,
Atmosphere template data
Wikipedia article about Lucky Imaging
Publications, User's Guide, Checklists
Performance
Links
Internal pages
last update: 6 April 2009
editor: Stefan Hippler