High contrast imaging at the LBT: the LEECH exoplanet imaging survey
Abstract
In Spring 2013, the LEECH (LBTI Exozodi Exoplanet Common Hunt) survey began its 130-night campaign from the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) atop Mt Graham, Arizona. This survey benefits from the many technological achievements of the LBT, including two 8.4-meter mirrors on a single fixed mount, dual adaptive secondary mirrors for high Strehl performance, and a cold beam combiner to dramatically reduce the telescope's overall background emissivity. LEECH neatly complements other high-contrast planet imaging efforts by observing stars at L' (3.8 m), as opposed to the shorter wavelength near-infrared bands (1-2.4 m) of other surveys. This portion of the spectrum offers deep mass sensitivity, especially around nearby adolescent (0.1-1 Gyr) stars. LEECH's contrast is competitive with other extreme adaptive optics systems, while providing an alternative survey strategy. Additionally, LEECH is characterizing known exoplanetary systems with observations from 3-5m in preparation for JWST.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1407.2876,
title = {High contrast imaging at the LBT: the LEECH exoplanet imaging survey},
author = {Andrew J. Skemer and Philip Hinz and Simone Esposito and Michael F. Skrutskie and Denis Defrere and Vanessa Bailey and Jarron Leisenring and Daniel Apai and Beth Biller and Mickael Bonnefoy and Wolfgang Brandner and Esther Buenzli and Laird Close and Justin Crepp and Robert J. De Rosa and Silvano Desidera and Josh Eisner and Jonathan Fortney and Thomas Henning and Karl-Heinz Hofmann and Taisiya Kopytova and Anne-Lise Maire and Jared R. Males and Rafael Millan-Gabet and Katie Morzinski and Apurva Oza and Jenny Patience and Abhijith Rajan and George Rieke and Dieter Schertl and Joshua Schlieder and Kate Su and Amali Vaz and Kimberly Ward-Duong and Gerd Weigelt and Charles E. Woodward and Neil Zimmerman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.2876},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
12 pages, 5 figures. Proceedings of the SPIE, 9148-20