Last night was windy with over 20knots of gusting sea breeze. Set up the AO system (SX AO on f4/200 Newtonian) in the open on an EQ6, a situation that would normally rule out any imaging due to the uncontrolled wobbling of the mount with wind loading.
In the worst conditions of the night, neither AO nor unguided imaging was possible – there was just too much movement. However, after a few hours, the wind abated slightly and the AO could manage the jitter - results at:
http://www.astrobin.com/full/113137/0/?real=&mod=
The top row of 10 heavily cropped sub images shows what happened unguided in these conditions – I would only class one of the subs as usable. The lower row of subs shows how well the AO corrected mount movement – over half of the subs were usable. The AO did a good job, since the better quality subs had FWHM of around 2.5 arc sec and reasonable star roundness – I would regard these as high enough quality to be useful for either colour or luminance. Very bright stars showed some smearing caused by uncontrolled motion (before the AO reacted), but these images could still be usable with median stacking.
As an additional test, I tried everything with the RCC1 coma corrector in place – there is just enough back focus to fit the AO, a thin OAG and a thin filter wheel. There did not appear to be any hidden "gotcha"s.
Although the scope is an f4 with 800mm fl, it is being used for high resolution imaging – the small pixels yield a system with sampling of 0.93 arcsec, which is about equivalent to a 2m fl scope with 9micron pixels. From this perspective, the AO did a good job in windy conditions and the results validate the suggestion in the earlier diagram that an AO can be useful in wind. The other suggestions that AO works well with a lower capability mount and also in very good seeing, and that it is not worthwhile in poor seeing, are all borne out by the observations of other users.
And finally, thanks again to Poita(Peter) for letting me use the AO.
Thanks for reading. Regards Ray