Related papers: A New High Contrast Imaging Program at Palomar Obs…

Small-angle coronagraphy is technically and scientifically appealing because it enables the use of smaller telescopes, allows covering wider wavelength ranges, and potentially increases the yield and completeness of circumstellar…

We have designed and built the first band-limited coronagraphic mask used for ground-based high-contrast imaging observations. The mask resides in the focal plane of the near-infrared camera PHARO at the Palomar Hale telescope and receives…

The band-limited coronagraph is a nearly ideal concept that theoretically enables perfect cancellation of all the light of an on-axis source. Over the past years, several prototypes have been developed and tested in the laboratory, and more…

Ground-based high contrast exoplanet imaging requires state-of-the-art adaptive optics (AO) systems in order to detect extremely faint planets next to their brighter host stars. For such extreme AO systems (with high actuator count…

Extreme adaptive optics systems are now in operation across the globe. These systems, capable of high order wavefront correction, deliver Strehl ratios of 90% in the near-infrared. Originally intended for the direct imaging of exoplanets,…

We propose a high-contrast coronagraph for direct imaging of young Jupiter-like planets orbiting nearby bright stars. The coronagraph employs a step-transmission filter in which the intensity is apodized with a finite number of steps of…

We present an extension of the spectral deconvolution method (Sparks & Ford 2002) to achieve very high contrast at small inner working radii. We apply the method to the specific case of ground based adaptive optics fed integral field…

Exoplanet detection and characterization through extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) is a key science goal of future extremely large telescopes. This achievement, however, will be limited in sensitivity by both quasi-static wavefront errors and…

We propose a new concept of pupil motion sensor for astronomical adaptive optics systems and present experimental results obtained during the first laboratory validation of this concept. Pupil motion is an important issue in the case of…

Well over 700 exoplanets have been detected to date. Only a handful of these have been observed directly. Direct observation is extremely challenging due to the small separation and very large contrast involved. Imaging polarimetry offers a…

NACO is the famous and versatile diffraction limited NIR imager and spectrograph with which ESO celebrated 10 years of Adaptive Optics at the VLT. Since two years a substantial effort has been put in to understanding and fixing issues that…

The Optimal Optical CoronagraphWorkshop at the Lorentz Center in September 2017 in Leiden, the Netherlands gathered a diverse group of 25 researchers working on exoplanet instrumentation to stimulate the emergence and sharing of new ideas.…

The accumulation of aberrations along the optical path in a telescope produces distortions and speckles in the resulting images, limiting the performance of cameras at high angular resolution. It is important to achieve the highest possible…

We conducted a number of multi-band coronagraph experiments using a vacuum chamber and a binary-shaped pupil mask which in principle should work at all wavelengths, in the context of the research and development on a coronagraph to observe…

High-contrast imaging will be a challenge for future ELTs, because their vibrations create low-order aberrations - mostly tip/tilt - that reduce coronagraphic performances at 1.2 lambda/D and above. A Low-Order WaveFront Sensor (LOWFS) is…

In the context of high contrast imaging, we propose to evaluate the performance of the Apodized Pupil Lyot Coronagraph (APLC) working without Lyot Stop, namely Stop-less Lyot Coronagraph (SLLC). This coronagraph is a combination of an…

We describe a new high-contrast imaging capability well suited for studying planet-forming disks: near-infrared (NIR) high-contrast spectropolarimetric imaging with the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) system coupled…

MISTRAL is the new Faint Object Spectroscopic Camera mounted at the folded Cassegrain focus of the 1.93m telescope of Haute-Provence Observatory. We describe the design and components of the instrument and give some details about its…

We describe the coronagraphic upgrade underway for the Mid-Infrared Array Camera-5 (MIRAC-5) to be used with the 6.5-m MMT telescope utilizing the new MMT Adaptive optics exoPlanet characterization System (MAPS). Mid-IR ground-based…

At present, the principal limitation on the resolution and contrast of astronomical imaging instruments comes from aberrations in the optical path, which may be imposed by the Earth's turbulent atmosphere or by variations in the alignment…