The Doğu Anadolu Gözlemevi (Eastern Anatolia Observatory, abbreviated as DAG) is the new national observatory of Turkey, located on the Karakaya Ridge at an elevation of 3170 m above sea level, near the city of Erzurum.
Past measured clear nights ratio of 260/365 and a median seeing of 0.9" shall promise great observing conditions for direct imaging of exoplanets, with our PLACID "adaptive" high-contrast instrument (see plot for previous on-site characterization measurements).
The DAG telescope is based on a Alt-Az Ritchey-Chrétien architecture, fielding an actively-controlled primary mirror (M1) of 4-m and a secondary mirror (M2) of 1-m in size, with a third mirror (M3) feeding either one of the two gravity-invarient Nasymth platforms available: a seeing-limited platform (to be used for spectroscopy) and a diffraction-limited platform encompassing an in-flange derotator (KORAY, developped by HEIG-VD), an extreme adaptive-optics system (TROIA, developped by HEIG-VD) and a state-of-the-art near-infrared HAWAII-1RG detector (DIRAC, developed by AAO/MacQuarrie University of Sydney): this is where we will install our PLACID exoplanet imager instrument, right in-between the TROIA XAO and the DIRAC camera.
The Programmable Liquid-crystal Active Coronagraphic Imager for the DAG telescope (PLACID) instrument is a novel high-contrast direct imaging facility that will come online later this year. In a nutshell, PLACID will consist in a fore-optics coronagraphic intermediate stage platform, located downstream the TROIA XAO system and upstream of the DIRAC HAWAII-2RG focal-plane array.
The PLACID project is led by a consortium of Swiss Universities (University of Bern + HEIG-VD University of Applied Sciences) contracted by the Atatürk University Astrophysics Research and Application Center (ATASAM).
In practice, PLACID will be the world's first ever “active coronagraph” facility, fielding a customized spatial light modulator (SLM) acting as a dynamically programmable focal-plane phase mask (FPM) coronagraph from H- to Ks-band (1.6 to 2.2 um). This will provide a wealth of novel options to the observers, among which software-only abilities to change or re-align the coronagraphic FPM pattern in function of conditions or science requirements, free of any actuator motion. Future capabilities will include non-common path aberrations (NCPA) self-calibration, optimized coronagraphy for binaries or multiple stars, as well as coherent differential imaging (CDI). As such, the PLACID facility will be a platform of choice for international collaborations and prototyping of new concepts, with anticipated very positive impact for the nascent Turkish astronomy community.
The PLACID project is led by a consortium of Swiss Universities (University of Bern & HEIG-VD Yverdon) contracted by the Turkish National Observatories (formerly ATASAM), Erzurum, Turkey.
AMOS and EIE are the industrial contractors responsible for the construction of the DAG observatory and the telescope.