Related papers: AOLI: Near-diffraction limited imaging in the visi…

In traditional lucky imaging (TLI), many consecutive images of the same scene are taken with a high frame-rate camera, and all but the sharpest images are discarded before constructing the final shift-and-add image. Here we present an…

In this work, we study the advantages of using a Lucky Imaging camera for the observations of potential planetary microlensing events. Our aim is to reduce the blending effect and enhance exoplanet signals in binary lensing systems composed…

The amount of Adaptive Optics (AO) telemetry generated by VIS/NIR ground-based observatories is ever greater, leading to a growing need for a standardised data exchange format to support performance analysis and AO research and development…

Infrared avalanche photodiode arrays represent a panacea for many branches of astronomy by enabling extremely low-noise, high-speed and even photon-counting measurements at near-infrared wavelengths. We recently demonstrated the use of an…

We overview the current status of photometric analyses of images collected with Multi Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) at 8-10m class telescopes that operated, or are operating, on sky. Particular attention will be payed to resolved stellar…

The High Angular Resolution Monolithic Optical and Near-infrared Integral field spectrograph (HARMONI) is the visible and near-infrared (NIR), adaptive-optics-assisted, integral field spectrograph for ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).…

We present a low-loss integrated photonics platform in the visible and near ultraviolet regime. Fully-etched waveguides based on atomic layer deposition (ALD) of aluminum oxide operate in a single transverse mode with $<$3 dB/cm propagation…

Since the year 2000, adaptive optics (AO) has seen the emergence of a variety of new concepts addressing particular science needs; multiconjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) is one of them. By correcting the atmospheric turbulence in 3D using…

We present laboratory results of the closed-loop performance of the Magellan Adaptive Optics (AO) Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM), pyramid wavefront sensor (PWFS), and VisAO visible adaptive optics camera. The Magellan AO system is a…

Adaptive optics (AO) is critical in astronomy, optical communications and remote sensing to deal with the rapid blurring caused by the Earth's turbulent atmosphere. But current AO systems are limited by their wavefront sensors, which need…

We use high-resolution adaptive optics (AO) imaging on the Keck II telescope to study the gravitational lens B0128+437 in unprecedented detail, allowing us to resolve individual lensed quasar components and, for the first time, detect and…

Adaptive optics laser guide star systems perform atmospheric correction of stellar wavefronts in two parts: stellar tip-tilt and high-spatial-order laser-correction. The requirement of a sufficiently bright guide star in the field-of-view…

Transforming the instrumental photometry of ground-based telescopes into a calibrated physical flux in a well-defined passband is a major challenge in astronomy. Along with the intrinsic instrumental difference between telescopes sharing…

MAIA, an acronym for Mercator Advanced Imager for Asteroseismology, is a three-channel instrument that targets fast-cadence three-colour photometry, installed at the 1.2-m Mercator telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos at La Palma (Canary…

Detection of small objects and objects far away in the scene is a major challenge in surveillance applications. Such objects are represented by small number of pixels in the image and lack sufficient details, making them difficult to detect…

Lucky imaging is a high-resolution astronomical image recovery technique with two classic implementation algorithms, i.e. image selecting, shifting and adding in image space and data selecting and image synthesizing in Fourier space. This…

The current direct observations of brown dwarfs and exoplanets have been obtained using instruments not specifically designed for overcoming the large contrast ratio between the host star and any wide-separation faint companions. However,…

Low-shot object counting addresses estimating the number of previously unobserved objects in an image using only few or no annotated test-time exemplars. A considerable challenge for modern low-shot counters are dense regions with small…

The future generation of telescopes will be equipped with multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) systems in order to obtain high angular resolution over large fields of view. MCAO comes in two flavors: star- and layer-oriented. Existing…

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a near-infrared instrument that uses Adaptive Optics (AO), a coronagraph, and advanced data processing techniques to achieve very high contrast images of exoplanets. The GPI Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) is a…