Preparation of AO-related observations and post-processing recipes for E-ELT HARMONI-SCAO

HARMONI is a visible and near-infrared integral field spectrograph designed to be a first-light instrument on the European extremely large telescope. It will use both single-conjugate and laser tomographic adaptive optics to fully exploit high-performance and sky coverage. Using a fast AO modelling toolbox, we simulate anisoplanatism effects on the point spread function of the single-conjugate adaptive optics of HARMONI. We investigate the degradation of the correction performance with respect to the off-axis distance in terms of Strehl ratio and ensquared energy. In addition, we analyse what impact the natural guide source magnitude, AO sampling frequency and number of sub-apertures have on performance. We show, in addition to the expected PSF degradation with the field direction, that the PSF retains a coherent core even at large off-axis distances. We demonstrated the large performance improvement of fine tuning the sampling frequency for dimer natural guide stars and an improvement of approx. 50% in SR can be reached above the nominal case. We show that using a smaller AO system with only 20x20 sub-apertures it is possible to further increase performance and maintain equivalent performance even for large off-axis angles.