In February 2014, the SHARK-VIS (System for High contrast And coronography from R to K at VISual bands) Forerunner, a high contrast experimental imager operating at visible wavelengths, was installed at LBT (Large Binocular Telescope). Here we report on the first results obtained by recent on-sky tests. These results show the extremely good performance of the LBT ExAO (Extreme Adaptive Optics) system at visible wavelengths, both in terms of spatial resolution and contrast achieved. Similarly to what was done by (Amara et al. 2012), we used the SHARK-VIS Forerunner data to quantitatively assess the contrast enhancement. This is done by injecting several different synthetic faint objects in the acquired data and applying the ADI (angular differential imaging) technique. A contrast of the order of 5×10−5 is obtained at 630 nm for angular separations from the star larger than 100 mas. These results are discussed in light of the future development of SHARK-VIS and compared to those obtained by other high contrast imagers operating at similar wavelengths.
@article{arxiv.1609.05147,
title = {High Contrast Imaging in the Visible: First Experimental Results at the Large Binocular Telescope},
author = {F. Pedichini and M. Stangalini and A. Ambrosino and A. Puglisi and E. Pinna and V. Bailey and L. Carbonaro and M. Centrone and J. Christou and S. Esposito and J. Farinato and F. Fiore and E. Giallongo and J. M. Hill and P. M. Hinz and L. Sabatini},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.05147},
year = {2017}
}