Telescope facilities are often uncomfortable for operators working for long periods of time.
[1] Researchers have expressed the need for a laboratory tool which could provide better and cheaper accessibility than a real telescope, and better characterization than computer simulations.
It is part of a turbulence simulator for the evaluation of on ground telescopes instrumentation developed by INTA (optics) and LIDAX (opto-mechanics) [2] for the IAC called IACATS.
As a result, a visible and infrared multi-spectral illumination system has been integrated as a part of the turbulence simulator.
A wave front sensor enables to evaluate the deformation that the phase plates, or the simulated turbulence, produce in the wave front coming from the illumination system and star simulator.