The DKIST Vibrometer: a high-speed camera system to identify image jitter

The NSF’s Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) is the world’s largest solar telescope at the summit of Haleakalā. All large observatories are subject to the negative impacts of vibrations, therefore, one of the goals during the operations and commissioning phase is to collect data to identify and mitigate image jitter. DKIST has five high spatial resolution facility instruments spread across a 16-meter rotating platform. Vibration sources such as moving instrument components, environmental control systems, and active optics can induce image jitter differently across large distances, causing non-common path errors uncorrectable by AO systems. We built a new tool called the Vibrometer, a high speed image tracker designed to measure image motion in order to assess the system optical vibrations at 2kHz rates. We will present how the Vibrometer played a vital role in eliminating the image jitter observed in the Visible Spectro-Polarimeter (ViSP) instrument's slit scanning images. The image jitter was caused by mechanical motion of the Visible Broadband Imager's (VBI) large two-axes camera stage while performing image mosaic scans during simultaneous measurements.