Solar MCAO with a single sensor: simulating tomographic reconstruction with the plenoptic camera

The Sun is an ideal object for the development of Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) since solar structure provides multiple “guide stars” in any desired configuration. Current MCAO systems imply a number of wavefront sensors, each of them sensing an area of the Sun. The plenoptic camera is a novel concept for wavefront sensing, capable of measuring the tomography of the atmospheric turbulence. By using it, the possibility of a MCAO system with a single sensor becomes a reality. This paper describes the functionality of the plenoptic camera as a tomographic wavefront sensor after implementing it into the OOMAO simulator. Simulation results demonstrate the potential of this sensor to reconstruct atmospheric turbulence in different layers by using a synthetic solar image as a reference.