Proc. SPIE 10706, Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation III, 107064T
As compared to single-mode fibers (SMFs), photonic lanterns could ease the coupling of starlight to single-mode astrophotonic instruments. Here we investigate numerically the advantage of using lanterns as compared to SMFs for seeing-limited and low-order adaptive telescopes. We find the turbulence strength below which focal-ratio-matched photonic lanterns provide an average flux per output equal to that of a sole SMF. Lastly, we look into the advantage of having a low-order adaptive optics (AO) as a way of relaxing the demand on the lantern size and complexity.