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Annual Report 2011 Max Planck Institute for Astronomy

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components. The owner of the ticket is in charge of<br />

the underlying task. Additional in<strong>for</strong>mation, such as<br />

due dates or dependencies on other tickets can be reflected.<br />

All in<strong>for</strong>mation is kept in a database. A simple<br />

interface allows to query and filter the tickets and,<br />

by that, to monitor the progress of the project or to<br />

identify open issues <strong>for</strong> upcoming milestones.<br />

• The version control system. Each trac project is associated<br />

with a subversion repository. For software<br />

development projects it is the place to store the code,<br />

but it can also be used to archive and control versions<br />

of documents.<br />

• Seamless interaction. Within trac it is very simple<br />

to introduce references to tickets, wiki pages, files in<br />

the repository, blog entries etc. All content within<br />

trac is also searchable.<br />

• Expandability. trac capabilities can easily be expanded<br />

by adding plugins. There is an active community<br />

developing a wide variety of plugins, such as the<br />

blogging system, user account management or Latex<br />

support in wiki pages. trac and its plugins are developed<br />

in the Python programming language; with<br />

reasonable ef<strong>for</strong>t it is possible to develop custom solutions<br />

needed <strong>for</strong> a project.<br />

trac and Linc-nirvana<br />

Linc-nirvana introduced trac in 2010 and uses it since<br />

with great success. More than 70 team members and reviewers<br />

from inside and outside of MPIA have access to<br />

Linc-nirvana’s trac.<br />

The project uses tickets to organize and follow up<br />

most development activities. Each team member involved<br />

in an activity gets in<strong>for</strong>med by email about updates.<br />

The tickets increase the efficiency of status meetings<br />

– they help to stay focused and provide all important<br />

in<strong>for</strong>mation on its subject in a commonly accessible<br />

1 Push-Pull<br />

2 Push-Pulls<br />

4 Push-Pulls<br />

8 Push-Pulls<br />

IV.4 Special Developments in the Technical Departments 81<br />

place. The tickets have demonstrated to be very helpful<br />

when collaborating with partners in different institutes.<br />

All project related documentation is archived in trac<br />

and is easily accessible in various places on the wiki,<br />

depending on their context. So are meeting minutes and<br />

notes, which are stored as blog posts.<br />

Thomas Bertram, Florian Briegel<br />

Interaction Matrix Calibration <strong>for</strong> Adaptive Optics:<br />

What is the best method?<br />

For an adaptive optics (AO) system it is necessary to<br />

characterize how the de<strong>for</strong>mable mirror (DM) interacts<br />

with the complete optical system up to the wavefront<br />

sensor. This procedure, commonly referred to as “calibrating<br />

the interaction matrix” (a matrix which is then inverted<br />

to produce the matrix <strong>for</strong> reconstructing the wavefront)<br />

is a process which is a key to achieve an optimal<br />

control of the DM. Members of the technical department<br />

at MPIA, working together with graduate student Xianyu<br />

Zhang and colleagues from INAF, have determined an<br />

optimal method <strong>for</strong> per<strong>for</strong>ming this calibration. These<br />

results appear in the article “Calibrating the interaction<br />

matrix <strong>for</strong> the Linc-nirvana high layer wavefont sensor”<br />

which was recently published in the journal Optics<br />

Express.<br />

Traditionally, interaction matrices have been calibrated<br />

by commanding the DM to a sequence of well-defined<br />

shapes, and, at each step in the sequence, taking<br />

a measurement of the light pattern seen by the sensor.<br />

But this process is affected by various sources of noise.<br />

Fig. IV.5.3: See text <strong>for</strong> details<br />

4 Frames<br />

3 Frames<br />

2 Frames<br />

200<br />

150<br />

100<br />

50<br />

0<br />

1 Frame<br />

Credit: MPIA

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