Feasibility study of a layer-oriented wavefront sensor for solar telescopes: comment

The future generation of telescopes will be equipped with multi-conjugate adaptive-optics (MCAO) systems in order to obtain high angular resolution over large fields of view. MCAO comes in two flavors: star- and layer-oriented. Existing solar MCAO systems rely exclusively on the star-oriented approach. Earlier we suggested a method to implement the layer-oriented approach, and in view of recent concerns by Marino and Wöger [Appl. Opt.53, 685 (2014)10.1364/AO.53.000685APOPAI1559-128X], we now explain the proposed scheme in further detail. We note that in any layer-oriented system one sensor is conjugated to the pupil and the others are conjugated to higher altitudes. For the latter, not all the sensing surface is illuminated by the entire field of view. The successful implementation of nighttime layer-oriented systems shows that the field reduction is no crucial limitation. In the solar approach the field reduction is directly noticeable because it causes vignetting of the Shack-Hartmann subaperture images. It can be accounted for by a suitable adjustment of the algorithms to calculate the local wavefront slopes. We discuss a further concern related to the optical layout of a layer-oriented solar system.