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The Research, Experiment and Validation of adaptive Optics on a Legacy Telescope (REVOLT) project is an on-sky AO technology research platform which was commissioned at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory’s (DAO) 1.2m telescope in Victoria, Canada in June 2022. The goal of the project is to provide a flexible and expandable AO system to test a wide variety of technologies and control strategies with rapid deployment to sky. To date, REVOLT has enabled the first on-sky use of the Herzberg Extensible Adaptive Realtime Toolkit (HEART), a realtime controller software package developed at the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics (NRC-HAA) research centre, slated to be deployed on multiple future AO instruments. REVOLT has provided the first on-sky demonstration of First Light Imaging’s C-Blue-One CMOS camera as a Shack-Hartmann Wavefront Sensor (SH-WFS), and demonstrated injection of the science PSF into a single mode fiber to feed experimental Spectral Correlation Sensor technology being developed to detect gas signatures in planetary atmospheres. Since its initial commissioning as a Single Conjugate AO (SCAO) system, an open loop arm, the GIRMOS Open Loop Demonstration (GOLD) arm, has been added to test OL calibration and control, and a Pyramid WFS (PWFS) arm has been added with the goal first of testing the Gemini Planet Imager 2 (GPI-2) HEART pipeline, as well as provide an on going test platform for PWFS research. This paper provides a full description of the current REVOLT system, summarizes the performance of each experiment conducted to date, highlights future plans and openly invites proposals for collaboration from the AO community.
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