An optical testbench and atmospheric turbulence emulator for astronomical image restoration

An optical testbench is described that emulates the effects of propagating monochromatic light through atmospheric turbulence. Unperturbed planar wavefronts, when imaged through an optical system, define a diffraction limited point spread function (PSF). Phase perturbations are introduced using a liquid crystal spatial light modulator (LC-SLM). The LC-SLM is programmed with a dynamic phase screen to generate a spatially variable PSF. A microcontroller is used to scroll a windowed region of the LC-SLM, generating spatio-temporal phase perturbations from one or more point sources. A novel method is proposed to measure phase modulation using wavefront tilt. The optical testbench is proposed for the study of inverse problems, such as atmospheric tomography and deconvolution from wavefront sensing.