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Deriving Telescope Mueller Matrices Using Daytime Sky Polarization Observations

2011; Institute of Physics; Volume: 123; Issue: 905 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/660894

1538-3873

David M. Harrington, J. R. Kuhn, Shannon Hall,

Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing

Telescopes often modify the input polarization of a source so that the measured circular or linear output state of the optical signal can be signficantly different from the input. This mixing, or polarization "cross-talk", is defined by the optical system Mueller matrix. We describe here an efficient method for recovering the input polarization state of the light and the full 4 x 4 Mueller matrix of the telescope with an accuracy of a few percent without external masks or telescope hardware modification. Observations of the bright, highly polarized daytime sky using the Haleakala 3.7m AEOS telescope and a coude spectropolarimeter demonstrate the technique.