Temporal Variability and Statistics of the Strehl Ratio in Adaptive-Optics Images

We have investigated the temporal variability and statistics of the "instantaneous" Strehl ratio. The observations were carried out with the 3.63-m AEOS telescope equipped with a high-order adaptive-optics system. In this paper Strehl ratio is defined as the peak intensity of a single short exposure. We have also studied the behavior of the phase variance computed on the reconstructed wavefronts. We tested the Maréchal approximation and used it to explain the observed negative skewness of the Strehl ratio distribution. The estimate of the phase variance is shown to fit a three-parameter Gamma distribution model. We show that simple scaling of the reconstructed wavefronts has a large impact on the shape of the Strehl ratio distribution.