1.5.11

Just got back from a week in the mountains to find the saturation problem apparently decided to solve itself. I had the DM's unpowered the whole time, so I'm wondering if its possible that the actuators are somehow accumulating a charge when I leave them on for extended periods. Obviously my code didn't change while I was gone, so that's that only thing I can think of that might change on its own.

Anyway, since things seem to be working again, I'm looking at target camera performance metrics. I have plots for a bunch of them and compared them to the approx. Strehl ratio using the Marechal approximation and the RMS wavefront error. Amazingly there's quite a nice correlation, and the PSF maximum is stationary enough to use a power in the bucket measure with reasonable bucket sizes.

In fact, the smaller the bucket the larger the increase in the average SR when the LTI loop is closed. Using 25 modes I'm seeing around a 20% increase in the average Strehl with a 3px square bucket centered on the unaberrated max PSF. I have no idea if this is satisfactory or not, but at least there's some improvement. My advisor favors this measure, so some things to look at:

- Variation of average improvement vs. bucket size
- Improvement vs. number of modes used
- Improvement with stronger/weaker disturbance amplitudes

This is assuming the sat. problem doesn't reappear. A big if.