Prediction of the off-axis point spread function for large field of view astronomical adaptive optics images

Atmospheric turbulence corrupts astronomical images formed by ground-based telescopes. Adaptive optics (AO) systems allow the effects of turbulence-induced aberrations to be reduced for a narrow field of view (FOV) corresponding approximately to the isoplanatic angle theta(0). For field angles larger than theta(0), the point spread function (PSF) gradually degrades as the field angle increases. Knowledge of the space-varying PSF is essential for image reconstruction. In this paper, we present a technique to predict the PSF as function of the field angle. The results are validated by mean of simulations. The predicted PSF is compared to the simulated PSF and we obtain a mean square (MS) error of 4.3% between the predicted and the simulated PSF in the worse case.